


spare me as I'm gone

by aliferlia



Category: CLAMP - Works, Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle
Genre: Multi, criminally low plot-to-dialogue ratio, heavy-handed symbolism, self-indulgent HAPPY TSUBASA FAMILY ramblings, self-indulgent OTP ramblings
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-25
Updated: 2014-03-16
Packaged: 2018-01-09 22:22:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 46,134
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1151501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aliferlia/pseuds/aliferlia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When a new enemy threatens Clow Kingdom, the High Queen enlists the help of a middle-aged-and-grumpy-about-it Kurogane.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. trust in his swift feet

Swallows were already massing high overhead by the time he reached the castle gates. One arm raised against the light, he stood and watched them a while as he made his horse fast to a post out in the wide yard. The mud was deep after the previous night’s rain, but the air was sweet and warm, the mist ablaze with light. He had missed the blooming of the imperial sakura that year, and now the leaves had already begun to turn: the broad maples raised red arms to the sky, and gingko trees stood in a wide golden ring all around the high walls. He put a hand to his horse’s neck and waited calmly for someone to notice him: for he had travelled alone, as was his habit of late, and had not bothered to send news of his arrival ahead.

‘Which is incredibly rude, you know,’ a tart voice remarked, nearly a full hour later, from the other end of the long audience chamber. ‘I don’t suppose you thought of what would have happened if I’d been engaged elsewhere.’

He strode nonchalantly down the red floors and leaned against a pillar. ‘Need to keep you on your toes,’ he explained. ‘A good host should always be ready to welcome guests, even at short notice.’

The Imperial High Priestess of the Moon threw her shoe at him.

Kurogane could have dodged it, but didn’t. He picked it up and returned it to her: knelt before her and slipped it carefully onto her foot. They were alone, and so the hand on his head, when it came, wasn’t a surprise. He looked up at her with the most irreverent grin he could muster. Only the faintest of lines showed in her still white face: the loveliness of her dark eyes was undiminished by age. Gently, she kissed his hair. He made a great show of shrugging her off: she made a great show of rolling her eyes.

‘I suppose you want my blessing for some new escapade, don’t you?’ she demanded, and flicked him on the forehead, so that he yelped. ‘Typical. You waltz on in whenever you need my approval, but can you ever be bothered to show up for a simple chat and a nice cup of tea? You missed hanami _again_ this year, you know. Souma-san was very disappointed. She said it just wasn’t the same without your big ugly face ruining the view.’

‘The sakura trees in Suwa are better,’ he said. ‘And yeah, your blessing would be nice, I guess. I got a -I got a thing.’

She paused. She was wearing gold and white and blue in complex layers he couldn’t be bothered to count, likely in honour of the season, since that was the sort of thing she liked to do: he was reminded suddenly of the rich new gold of the full moon that had risen from the mist the night before. His heart ached with something very like nostalgia. She had been so small when he had seen her for the first time, and bright as a star in the dimness. There were still a lot of things he had never said to her. He didn’t suppose that most of them mattered very much. She knew the important ones, after all.

Either it showed in his face, or else she had known all along, as he had half-suspected she would. For a moment her expression seemed haggard, as though a weight of years had overcome her all at once. She pressed one hand to her heart and swallowed. In brave tones, she remarked, ‘Don’t be silly. You’re far too old to go gallivanting off on another monster-hunt. Old men should set a good example for the children, you know.’

‘Old my ass,’ he said. He sighed: he pulled a bit of a face. He said, ‘Look,’ and explained.

It took a while.

When he was done, he leaned back against the pillar and considered his feet: focused very hard on the clean cotton scent of his yukata, the moving shadows of the leaves. The day was drawing to dusk, and that early edge of autumn cold that had seemed so sweet on the air while the sun still shone cut suddenly at his bones. He had always considered himself a brave man, but in that moment, he could not bring himself to look into Tsukiyomi’s eyes.

There came a rustling of fabric as she resettled herself. ‘So, you were given seven days’ notice,’ she said, in her clear, unwavering voice, ‘and of those seven, you spent two travelling here, and will spend two travelling back.’ She let out a small laugh. ‘You’ve found some manners in your old age after all, it seems.’

‘Your _face_ is in its old age,’ he snapped at his toes: drew a breath, looked up. ‘It’d feel weird setting off on a mission without you yelling at me first, I guess,’ he admitted, watching her carefully. ‘Old habits, you know. Don’t get excited.’ He lifted one shoulder in a half-hearted shrug. ‘’Sides, the idiot said I should come.’

He saw her eyebrows lift: he saw her smile. It was enough. It would always be enough.

  


* * *

  


The Lord of Suwa Prefecture had rebuilt the ruins of his ancestral home almost completely on reclaiming the land some fifteen years before, and had paid very close attention to the original structure of the house: but had, at the suggestion of his son, added several additional features. These included a water-powered generator and several metres of electrical cable, very useful in the colder winters, and a few solar panels that had been liberated from a desert prince who had had an unfortunate run-in with a time machine several realities right of Clow, not to mention an entire room filled solely with books (some holographic, most inked, no few electronic) in upward of a hundred different languages from various exciting places in the multiverse.

At the very heart of the house, however, just beside the kannushi’s innermost sanctum, stood a small box of red cherrywood. It was heavily warded with a series of complex ofuda that had been written up by Tsukiyomi herself, not to mention scored with glyphs from Old Celes, and, finally, equipped with a digital padlock from Piffle that was keyed to recognise only a select few voice patterns and genetic structures. It contained what looked for all the world like a hand mirror: large, lightweight, and elegantly worked with an enamel inlay that depicted a phoenix and a dragon, which was of course a purely traditional design and had no ulterior symbolism whatsoever, at least according to the Lord of Suwa. It came fully equipped with a multilingual translator pack and state-of-the-art interdimensional calling capabilities.

‘Hello, Sakura-chan!’ the kannushi might say one rainy afternoon, huddled up on the porch in a cocoon of blankets and sipping at his tea as he cradled the mirror in one hand. ‘Oh, you’ve cut your hair! How lovely! How are the children? Ah, is that a little hand I see waving at me? Hello! Oh, you’ve grown!’

Or, ‘Ah, Tomoyo-jyou! What a pleasure to hear from you. No, no, the big puppy’s not here at the moment - oh, yes, of course I’d be willing to have a look at the plans! Send them on through!’

Or, ‘Yukito-san! This is a nice surprise! Is Syaoran-kun looking for a book? Oh, could you say that again slower, please? You know, I’ve told him he really can’t just use our house as a dumping-ground for everything he can’t carry around with him, but does he listen? Honestly, he’s worse than his father.’

The incumbents of the Lord of Suwa Prefecture had all been assured that the mirror was a powerful magical tool that allowed him traffic with spirits from mystic planes, and knew not to take fright should they hear him chattering away to himself. ‘Which is only half a lie, anyway,’ Fai had remarked, flopping onto his stomach and kicking his heels. ‘And anyway, traffic with spirits from mystic planes sounds like it would be so much fun! I should have a beard and a floppy hat and melted candles everywhere.’

‘The hell kind of half-assed magician are you that you can’t pull that kind of shit, anyway?’ Kurogane had demanded, looking up from polishing Ginryuu. ‘You should be able to summon spirits and, and call monsters up out of the air to fight for you or something. What use are you if you can’t even do that?’

Fai sighed. ‘Has Syaoran-kun been sending Kuro-sama those manga books again?’ he asked. ‘Silly puppy. How many times have I told you that magic isn’t anything like it is in stories? Besides, they’re not good for you. I know you sulked when that one about the talking animals ended.’

‘I did no such thing!’ Kurogane snapped. ‘And they weren’t talking animals, they turned _into_ animals, and clearly you’re just a shitty mage who can’t summon monsters or appreciate good literature!’

The mirror - in actual fact one of sixteen or so prototypes, half of which remained in the possession of the Piffle Princess Corporation - was capable of contacting any other similar device, and also functioned as a natural stabiliser, with the result that there tended to be far less time-distortion between worlds in which prototypes were present. It was also capable of vastly reducing the potential pool of worlds from which the target of a randomised magical jump could be drawn. Syaoran had cried when Tomoyo had explained that to him.

‘And you _wear_ that scarf when it’s cold,’ Fai instructed him at least once a year. ‘I don’t care if the next world you go to is sunny! If it is, by the way, make sure to wear your sunscreen! But you _always_ forget to wrap up warm after you’ve been to one sunny world, and you can’t be a famous archaeologist if you’ve lost all your fingers to frostbite, you know!’

‘He’s not a kid anymore,’ Kurogane would grumble, before adding, usually with some embarrassment, ‘And don’t go and get your ass into trouble where I can’t come and help you out, kid.’

‘Syaoran doesn’t need Kurogane’s help!’ Mokona had protested. ‘Syaoran is big and strong now, so don’t worry! He doesn’t need to be coddled!’

‘No - no, Mokona, it’s not - it’s not like that!’ Syaoran said, catching earnestly at Fai’s hand. ‘It’s not like that at all! I’m very grateful that you’re so concerned for me, Fai-san, and I promise I will try to take care of myself, Kurogane-san, but -’

But, ‘How cruel!’ Fai wailed, spinning away to cover his face. ‘How can you toss your aged parents aside so casually? Oh, the youth of today have no shame!’

‘Fai-san, no!’ Syaoran insisted, looking terribly put-upon. Even in his thirties, he hadn’t yet managed to forget to blush whenever he found himself in the least bit distressed. He hastily donned the scarf, which had been hand-knitted by Fai in a cheerfully awful shade of orange. ‘I promise I’ll wear it! Look, look, I’m wearing it right now!’

‘He’s forgotten all about us, Kuro-papa,’ Fai remarked in tragic tones, having capitalised neatly on his grief by flinging himself into Kurogane’s arms. ‘He’s making his own way through the multiverse. He doesn’t need us anymore! We’re just washed-up old fossils now!’

‘You sure I can’t join you for a bit?’ Kurogane asked Syaoran in despair as he tried to wrench himself free from Fai’s grip. ‘This bastard’s driving me crazy.’

Once, and only once, had Syaoran called them with a request for assistance. He had spoken in brief, terse terms: the right side of his face had been heavily bandaged. He had said, ‘I’ll be in Suwa in seven days. I’ll understand if you can’t help out, truly I can, and know that I wouldn’t ask it of you if it weren’t so dire-’

‘Kid,’ Kurogane had said. ‘Shut up. I’m coming. You show up, you give me a lift throughback to Clow, and I’ll kill the bastards. Not a problem.’

‘But that’s the problem,’ Syaoran had said. ‘We don’t know how to kill them.’

  


* * *

  


He crossed the borders of Suwa Prefecture just before dawn, while the mist lay low along the ditches and paddies and the owls were still calling. By the time he reached the steading, dew shone on the grass and dripped from the eaves, and the chill white air glimmered faintly with young sunlight. He could hear the faint sounds of gossip and singing from the river, and knew that the women were already up: the scent of woodsmoke was close and sharp even in the mist. Already he was looking on the land with a kind of quiet, anticipatory nostalgia, as though he knew he would never see it again and were already grieving for its loss. He shook himself: that kind of thinking was cursework in itself.

The misty stableyard was deserted save for a girl of about fourteen, who sat alone on a grey boulder sharpening a knife and kicking her heels. ‘Good morning,  Kurogane-dono!’ she chirped: the puppy at her feet leapt up and began to worry at Kurogane’s ankle as he dismounted. ‘Nice to see you back safe and sound!’

‘Hey, kid,’ he said, and ruffled her hair briefly, because he had known her in several other worlds and liked her every time for her bravery and her kindness: she grinned proudly in response. ‘Place still standing?’

‘Nobody’s dead and we only had one fist-fight this time!’ she reported, catching at the horse’s bridle. ‘But that was just Sora-chan and Keiichi-chan arguing over who Kamui-chan’s best friend is _again_ , so it doesn’t count. Oh, oh, and Kannushi-sama said, when you got back, he wanted to talk to you right away! Shall I take the horse?’

Kurogane nodded. ‘Thanks, kid,’ he said, and made his way inside.

He bathed first, because he was stiff and exhausted and smelt of horse and travel. The arm had been most recently replaced about five years back, and had given him no great trouble since: but the edges of the old wound did sting in cold weather, and he needed hot water to ease the worst of it. It was odd to compare his left hand to his right, to see the strong youthful fabrication set against the thinner, rougher, more human flesh: when he looked into the dim lead-backed mirror to shave, he tried not to remember a time when his hair had been wholly black and his face unlined. His strength he had still. His courage had never failed him. He reminded himself of this assiduously.

The garden at the heart of the household was a holy place, and he had learned to respect it. He entered quietly and made his way to the edge of the porch, waited. He knew nothing of magic, but he could read the dark footsteps that crossed the dewy grass well enough. The bamboo stood up tall as the sky, and somewhere overhead a skylark spoke echoing through the fog. There came a flash of white in amongst the green, and the glimmer of pale hair in the murk. For the barest moment, Kurogane was caught and held by the notion that he had been away far longer than five days: that he had been travelling for years and years, spending his youth uselessly against wind and fear and time, and was returning now a stranger to a statue that had not changed at all. The hem of a kimono trailed across the grass: those thin white hands moved gracefully over the wet leaves. They might have belonged to a ghost, or story, a wandering star: but they had touched his mouth in the dark and held his wrists every night for the past twenty years, and so he was, for the most part, assured of their humanity.

‘Oi,’ Kurogane called: leaned against a post. ‘Oi!’

Fai didn’t so much as turn his head. ‘Good morning, Kuro-sama!’ he sang, reaching out to appraise the weight of a heavy red flower-head with one hand: a spider lily, Kurogane noted, dredging the name up from lessons with his mother a lifetime ago. ‘Are you back from your trip?’

‘If I weren’t, I wouldn’t be here, dumbass,’ Kurogane snapped. ‘Use your damn brain.’

There came a pleased laugh and a shiver of wet leaves as the stem snapped. Fai turned. ‘You’re very literal this morning,’ he remarked, raising an eyebrow. He wasn’t smiling, but there was a softness to his eyes that lifted the last of the unease from Kurogane’s chest. ‘Well? Don’t just sit there being a frowny puppy. How was everyone at Shirasagi?’

‘Same as ever,’ he shrugged, looking away. He tapped at his knee in agitation. ‘Tomoyo said she gets it. Gave me her blessing. So I’ll be heading out soon as the kid shows up.’ He hesitated. ‘Figured - I figured by now you’d be bugging me about wanting to go with me.’

Fai made a small noise, _ah!_ ‘Is _that_ why you’re being such a grumpy puppy?’ he asked. Still he made no move to draw closer. ‘Here I thought Tomoyo-hime had given you a good scolding again! You sulked for _days_ the last time.’

‘I did not sulk,’ Kurogane said, defensively. Pretending to be very interested in a particular knot of wood in the pillar, he added, ‘So, you’re not coming, then.’

Fai chuckled, then glanced abruptly down at the spider lily in his hands. ‘I’m going to stay here, Kuro-sama,’ he said as he inspected its petals. ‘You know that. I’m going to stay here, and it will be very peaceful without you, I’m sure, and only in the most extreme circumstances will I do anything so silly as come charging in after you, because much as I’d like to spend some time with Sakura-chan and the children while you go off and kill things, the wards do need to be held.’

Kurogane let out a breath: nodded once, a second time. His chest was tight. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘yeah. They do, I guess. So that’s that.’ He hadn’t even had to ask, he realised with something like astonishment. That Fai loved this place enough now to consider its protection his default task - that he loved it enough to put his duty to ensure its wellbeing before even his desire to stay at Kurogane’s side - was far too precious a truth even to acknowledge in words. He wanted to say _thank you_. He didn’t. ‘Already had to deal with enough of this sincerity crap for one week.’

‘Excuse me?’ Fai asked, arching one eyebrow. ‘You know it’s terribly bad manners to mumble like that. What did you say?’

‘I said, don’t give that dumbass Arisugawa permission to get married while I’m gone,’ Kurogane amended, hastily as he knew how. ‘I know he keeps asking you. He’s a good kid, but he’s still too young. Give ’em some time to get themselves sorted first, wait for ’em to show real commitment.’ He blinked: Fai was blushing slightly, and his lips had curled up into a bashful grin. ‘Oh, come on, tell me you didn’t.’

‘The poor child was _so_ sincere,’ Fai said. ‘So I gave him my blessing! Except then he ended up grabbing Keiichi-kun’s ear with his chopsticks because of something Kamui-kun said, and then there was a brawl! Terribly exciting - lots of fun apart from the broken noses.’ He waved a hand, grinning. ‘But look at you! I bet _you_ wanted to be the one who gave Sorata-kun your blessing! Don’t worry, he was probably much too drunk to remember any of it. You’ll still get to be a good Kuro-daddy and give your son permission to marry!’

‘I - no, you idiot, that’s not what I - that’s not what I meant! He’s a _kid_ , damn you!’

‘He’s only a few years younger than you were when you met me,’ Fai reminded him, which only served to make Kurogane feel older still. ‘Don’t play coy! I know you want to be a good daddy and make sure all your children have good strong marriages! Oh! And good strong babies! Don’t you want to be a grandfather in this world, too? You’re already so _good_ at being a wise old grumpy grandpapa! It’s not fair for the Clow Kingdom babies to get all the love!’

‘I swear to God I am going to kill you,’ Kurogane snapped. ‘Would you stop talking crap for two seconds? Seriously, for _once_ in your life, could you just - hey! Quit laughing, damn you!’

Fai was already skipping towards him. ‘Don’t worry, Kuro-sama,’ he said, coming to lean against the pillar so that he could beam up into Kurogane’s face. His cheeks were pink in the chill, his hair starred with dew. Kurogane looked away, somewhat breathless. ‘I’ll still love you when you’re old and wrinkly.’

Kurogane could only huff and glower. ‘You bet your ass you will,’ he muttered. ‘Say _old_ one more time, I dare you.’

Fai’s grin widened: he hugged the pillar, hummed as he thought. ‘Venerable, then,’ he suggested.

‘Fuck you,’ Kurogane said, and then, as Fai crowed and began to open his mouth to say _Is that an offer?,_ reached out suddenly and caught at his wrist, drew him in close. Fai went willing to him and looped his arms around Kurogane’s neck, put his lips to Kurogane’s throat with a quiet sigh. They really were getting old, little as Fai’s face might show it. ‘Hey,’ he said, quietly, into Fai’s hair, which smelled very sweetly of hyssop and of mint. ‘I - look, I’ve got a question, but you can’t kid around about it.’

Fai tapped Kurogane on the nose with one cold finger. ‘When have I ever kidded around about anything, o most august and venerable Kuro-jiichan?’ he asked.

‘Jii-chan -?’ Kurogane spluttered as Fai cackled loudly. ‘ _Jii-chan_ , you _bastard_ \- no. No, no, shut up, don’t say anything, I’ll murder you later, just shut up.’ He twisted his fingers into Fai’s sleeves almost unconsciously, barely noticed when Fai began carding through his greying hair with a careful touch. He took a long time to compose his thoughts, but even so, when he spoke them out they proved clumsy and childish, just as he had feared. ‘You ever think about - about, you know, where we’d end up after we died? Whenever you die, that is - would you reincarnate, or something? Or even - if there’s others like us, in other worlds - you ever think about that?’

‘I’m sure there are versions of us out there _somewhere_ ,’ Fai allowed, rubbing gently at the nape of Kurogane’s neck. ‘It is strange that we never met any. And reincarnation is a tricky thing: it seems to take a very long time, and of course there’s no guarantee that you’ll end up in the same place as somebody even if you both manage to reincarnate at the same time. The whole business is messy.’ Here Fai paused a moment, eyeing Kurogane closely. ‘You’d better not be thinking of dying on me.’

‘Just wondered, is all.’

Fai gave a small _hmm_ of amusement. ‘You know, I’ve always been very certain that if you do ever end up reincarnating, I’ll probably just wind up following you eventually,’ he said, in that particular way of his that was somehow chiding and nonchalant and affectionate, at all once. ‘You’ll most likely have some awfully long name, some terrible big-bad-monster-killing name that shows how fierce you are, and if I’m not around, who will think of adorable nicknames to make you less scary?’

‘So, what, I’d be stuck with you all over again?’ Kurogane demanded. ‘Geez. Is my karma that bad? Like one lifetime wasn’t bad enough.’

‘Karma has nothing to do with it. And besides, we wouldn’t be _stuck_.’ Fai gave his hair a little tug by way of rebuke. ‘Are you stuck with me now? You could boot me out right now if you wanted to. Or I could leave. I could go anywhere. I could go and live with Tomoyo-chan and have some _decent_ conversation for once, and not have to put up with a big grumpy puppy tracking mud in all over the floors every day.’

A wind moved through the holy garden. ‘Yeah, but, the wards,’ Kurogane mumbled. ‘And stuff.’

‘And stuff?’

Fai kept his hair long, and had for several years now: Kurogane reached for it and began almost unconsciously to play with the strands, as he often did when he wanted to avoid a conversation. ‘Yeah,’ he said, gruffly, twisting it gently around his fingers and bringing it up to his lips, breathing in the scent of it. ‘Stuff.’ His face was hot. ‘I chose you. You chose me. That wasn’t - whatever, fate, or anything. Whole reason we even met was ’cause the universe got so messed up, ’cause people were screwing around with fate.’

‘You never listened to anything Majou-san said, did you, you silly puppy?’ Fai asked, sighing: pressed his cold forehead against Kurogane’s. ‘We’ll meet again after we die. I truly do believe that, more than I believe anything else. Maybe it’ll be here, a thousand years from now. Maybe it’ll be a different you and a different me in another world. It doesn’t matter. All I know is that we’ll meet again, and when we do, we’ll choose again. Maybe we’ll be best friends. Maybe we’ll try to kill each other. Maybe we’ll get married. Maybe you’ll be a king and I’ll be a poor fisherman. Maybe you’ll be a rabbit and I’ll be a fox. It doesn’t matter what happens. I will see you again.’

Kurogane swallowed: looked up. Those eyes stood pale and clear, their expression very soft. ‘That,’ he said, ‘that. That wouldn’t be too bad.’

Fai leaned in to kiss him, yearning and sweet. Kurogane clutched helplessly at the sleeves of his kimono and drew him down.

There came a small but distinct cough, and they broke apart. Fai glanced over Kurogane shoulder, raised his eyebrows: said, in a loud stage-whisper, ‘So, if you won’t give Sorata-kun your blessing, since Arashi-chan is already pregnant, what should we -’

‘Since _what_?’ Kurogane demanded, spluttering, but then there came footsteps behind him, and Arashi had crossed the porch, her red miko’s hakama whispering against the boards, and was standing behind him tapping her foot. Kurogane fairly leapt away from Fai, flushing, and scrambled to his feet. ‘You’re _pregnant_?’ he demanded of the girl.

He should have known better than to expect an answer: she only shrugged, eyebrow raised, and fixed him with a gaze so sharp and steady it had him gulping. Behind them, Fai was chuckling. Kurogane choked and backed down. ‘Very funny,’ he muttered. ‘Good joke. You need something, kid?’

She gave him a small polite bow, quite unperturbed, and moved past him, took Fai’s waiting hand and hopped down into the garden. ‘I do like that flower,’ she said to Kurogane. ‘It suits you.’

Kurogane blinked, reached up: found that Fai must, at some point, have tucked the spider lily behind his ear quite without his noticing. He squawked, fuming, and flung it at Fai: who caught it neatly despite being engaged in a terrible fit of cackling and promptly began to fix it into Arashi’s hair instead.

‘You take care of these dumbasses while I’m gone, you hear?’ Kurogane said to the girl, because he was fairly certain that she was the only sensible person left in the province.

‘Yes, Kurogane-dono,’ she said, waiting patiently for Fai to finish adjusting the lily.

‘And if that moron does anything stupid, you have my permission to kill him,’ he added, nodding at Fai, who had taken a step back and cocked his head, the better to appreciate his handiwork.

‘No, Kurogane-dono,’ Arashi said, quite seriously. ‘We need him to hold the wards. He’s too useful to kill.’

This only made Fai fling his arms around her and sniffle loudly about loyalty, knocking the lily quite askew. ‘I knew you loved me best, Arashi-chan!’ he wailed. ‘Oh, you’re such a good daughter! If only your reprobate father and all his terrible children could be more like you.’

‘I’m nobody’s damn father and I don’t have any kids!’ Kurogane yelled, feeling distinctly ruffled, and turned away. ‘Let me know when you’re done with your magic crap,’ he called over his shoulder, ‘and no more fucking flowers!’

  


* * *

  


Left behind in the rainy garden, Fai gently settled his hands on Arashi’s shoulders and set to work on the small charms that would purify her before they began the day’s lesson. She was an extremely talented girl, possessed of tremendous spiritual powers and a steely discipline besides: Fai would have trusted her with Suwa before anyone else, even himself.

‘That wasn’t bad for a test run, I suppose,’ she remarked, as the last of the spells looped around her throat with a shimmer of power and sloughed her clean of all the everyday spiritual imperfections that tended to accumulate in such a busy household. ‘He didn’t even threaten to kill Arisugawa.’

‘Kuro-sama’s problem is that he thinks you’re all still five years old,’ Fai said, fondly, and gave her shoulders a comforting squeeze: spun away with a sudden burst of energy, shook the last of the magic from his fingertips. The wind moved with him, stirred the clouds in the grey sky overhead. ‘Never you mind! We’ll just keep easing him into it gently. I’m sure he’ll be quite on board with the idea before you start to show.’

‘If he isn’t, I’ll just punch him,’ she said, and sat down on the porch, kicking her heels just the littlest bit in the long wet grass. ‘He’ll come back,’ she added, in a changed voice. ‘I can see it. He’s asleep, but he’s still here. He’ll come back.’

Fai stopped where he was and looked back at her: her knuckles shone white where she gripped the folds of her hakama, and her eyes were fixed glassy on some distant point that he could not see. He started toward her in concern, but even as he reached her and took her arms in concern, she drew a great rattling gasp and put a hand to her mouth, breathing hard. Two spots of red stood out sharp in her white face. She lifted the spider lily from the dewy grass and sat a long while staring at it.

‘Sorry, Kannushi-sama,’ she said, finally in a shaky voice: made a visible effort to compose herself, sat up straighter. Still the lily trembled in her hands. ‘I just - I saw. That.’

‘Thank you, Arashi-chan,’ Fai said, gently, and helped her down into the garden again, gave her a quick hug to ease her shaking. ‘I really appreciate it! Now, shall we get on with today’s lesson?’

  


* * *

  


Kurogane had returned to Suwa a little under twenty years before to reclaim from fire what was his by blood, and had found the damage not so dire as he had imagined. With the threat of invasion now moderately reduced, some few families had begun to settle in the hills ranged all about, which were safer and rather more defensible, but the open valley below remained a place of ghosts, and the bamboo groves that had sprung up thick in wake of the heavy spring rainfall still hid clutches of blackened stone. Only the tracks of deer and the occasional intrepid bamboo-cutter were left to serve as roads: the river had not been fished in years. Rain came down sweet and warm over it all and set the leaves whispering. To Kurogane it had been as though he had stepped into a song or a saga, some hero-tale of early childhood, dimly remembered through a grey veil of rain and edged round with living green all dewy and undisturbed. He had walked the burnt-out perimeter of the old homestead. He had found the stone, the old standing stone where he had slumped, one arm pinned high above his head: remembered moonlight spilling thick through smoke, the smell of fire lodged forever in his throat. He found a small mark, its edges eaten smooth by wind and time, and touched his fingers to it with a soft sound of struck steel. No stain of blood remained.

He had happened to have with him a magician of tremendous skill, who had been more than happy to lend his magic to the accomplishment of such mundane but fundamental tasks as felling timber and hewing granite: and who had also, after three full days’ sleepless consideration of a particular mossy dell skinned thick with kokuru and scorched stone, pronounced that the traces of spiritual power still remaining were quite sufficient to allow him to develop a very similar shielding spell, that he had hit upon a number of very exciting theories that might shed light upon some interesting similarities between the defensive applications of spiritually-generated kekkai and the shielding techniques espoused by Old Valerian magic, and that Kurogane’s mother must have been a superbly efficient warden of admirable spiritual ability, following all of which he had collapsed snoring into Kurogane’s arms and spent the next sixteen hours drooling affectionately into his lap. They built the house around that empty dell, where once, long ago, a woman had sat in prayer: they planted bamboo there, and lilies, and a hundred smaller nameless flowers.

They had camped on the banks of the river beneath green boughs of cloudy pine for nearly three months, tired and dirty and covered in mosquito bites but oddly tranquil all the same, until their work had progressed far enough to allow them to put up the beginnings of a roof over the rough-boarded floor. They shared a cloak by night and washed each other’s backs in the stream each morning, took it in turns to gather firewood, waited out the worst of the rain in the shelter of a half-built corridor and passed the time with quiet conversation and wicked laughter. This was what they had fought for, in the end: to doze head on shoulder and hand in hand under a pale daymoon while swallows swung low beneath unvarnished eaves, to tug each other down into the old year’s leaves, shove irreverent handfuls of grass into each other’s hair and complain afterwards about small stones underhand. This was as much a part of the rebuilding as any effort of stone or timber. This was their reclamation.

The house grew up from rocks and from river mud with the tentative assistance of the nearby farmers, slowly at first, then steadily and more steadily still as the families living all about had come to know the new incumbents, had swapped half-remembered stories of the Silver Dragon and his legendary acts of valour, had recalled to mind the name of the lone surviving child who had gone to serve at Shirasagi. Three orphans in particular attached themselves to the project, and he supposed that he could do worse than take them on as wards, especially since he recognised their faces. Two sisters travelled three prefectures to announce that their great-aunt had once served the miko at Suwa, and to offer their allegiance to the new lord: they were medics, both of them, and highly skilled. A travelling architect from Shirasagi itself arrived and announced that they were doing everything all wrong and that it was a good thing that Tsukiyomi had thought to send her in to help. Kurogane had known all of them before, had fought beside them or for them or against them under skies on the other side of reality, had spent a night at their firesides on worlds in the very furthest reaches of creation, had been fed and on many occasions healed thanks to their compassion. He repaid these debts now, as best he could. In any case, a lord needed a household.

Summer opened up from rainbearing spring, and still the hard work of construction progressed. Fai’s face blistered pink from the sun, but his smile softened and his eyes grew gentler with every passing day, and he picked so many flowers that he never seemed to be without a bundle on hand to weave happily into someone’s hair. He set up an impromptu classroom for the children whenever he could find the time, scratching his sunburnt nose and fanning himself exaggeratedly with a gunsen Kurogane had bought him, telling them fantastic sagas of far-off worlds and miraculous kingdoms, then joined them and sat learning obediently when the architect arrived to teach them how to read and write. Syaoran arrived and spent seven days learning the names of the new family, then departed, having promised presents to all the children on his return. They built, and they built, and suddenly two decades had passed, and the walls of the household of the Lord of Suwa rose tall and unassailable through the mists, and men came down to fish the river and cut bamboo each morning. The wards stood strong about it all. Their patchwork family had swelled to upward of thirty dependants, all with their own complex entanglements: they tended the paddies in the valley beyond and bred goats and geese, spun wool and wove cloth. Fai grew his hair long and taught magic to those he thought showed aptitude for it. Kurogane gave Ginryuu to rest in a secret place in the room he shared with Fai, took up a shorter easier sword, taught children to fight for themselves against hardship.

And still, through all the years, still Kurogane feared only that which he knew he could not fight. He had learned to bear loss, had learned at great cost that not even he could defend all that he loved from cruelty and from hardship, and yet even with that knowledge fought back as best he could against ruin. He did not believe in any destiny he did not choose himself.

  


* * *

  


_30 seconds until jump!_ said the mirror’s very pink holographic interface. _29! 28!_ _27!_

Fai kissed Kurogane deeply, then squeezed him in a very inappropriate place, purely because he could. ‘Don’t go having too many adventures without me!’ he sang. ‘You dashing universe-traversing miscreant, you.’

‘You’re the miscreant, you - you miscreant!’ Kurogane snapped, swatting him away. ‘Get _off_.’

_19! 18!_

‘Such a naughty puppy,’ Fai sighed. ‘Don’t you go forgetting about me, now, you hear? Or I’ll replace you with a big bad watch-dog that actually listens to me.’

‘Excuse me? _Replace_ me? Nothing replaces me,’ Kurogane muttered, slinging Ginryuu over his shoulder.

_8! 7! 6!_

Fai blinked at him. In the light of evening his hair shone red as blood, but his eyes were clear as ever. Kurogane’s heart stuttered. ‘True,’ Fai admitted: and smiled, very softly.

_3! 2!_

Heart aching, Kurogane said, ‘See you around,’ closed his eyes and stepped out into the multiverse.


	2. fear five hundred men

Clow Kingdom turned through two seasons, one long, the other very short. The year began and ended in a white heat that sank only briefly into mild winter. Kurogane arrived right in the middle of the desert’s annual rainstorm, which would last ten grey days total and leave in its wake several thousand flowering stones.

‘Aren’t they pretty?’ Syaoran asked, picking up what looked like any one of a hundred other rocks lying in the sand outside the city walls and turning it over to reveal that it was, in fact, a succulent plant, its two fleshy leaves cupped carefully around a red flower. ‘They only bloom during the rain. They’re supposed to be good luck.’

‘Yay, good luck!’ Mokona chirped from somewhere inside Syaoran’s hood. ‘But are they good to eat?’

‘Kid,’ Kurogane said, huddling deeper into his cloak as Mokona began gnawing industriously on a leaf, ‘it’s raining and I don’t care.’

 ‘Oh - right, right, sorry,’ Syaoran stammered, flushing, and led Kurogane inside the walls and up the empty streets. Wet sand clung to their boots: penned geese blared their discontent from the shelter of the low square houses.

‘We’re hoping that the rain might delay the attacks for a little while,’ Syaoran explained, quietly, as they walked. ‘The flatter terrain is very dangerous under rain - difficult to navigate, for a start, and prone to flooding for another. The seasonal riverbeds have already started filling fifty miles downwind, which means that making camp is risky. Of course, I keep having to leave every four or five days, and even with the President’s stabilisers it’s days before I can find my way back to Clow, and twice I’ve arrived too far in the past to be any help at all. I did get to go to Anzu’s fifth birthday party, though! They made good cake three years ago.’

‘What, the pork-bun still hasn’t figured out how to aim properly?’ Kurogane asked, smirking at Mokona as she decided that stones were not good to eat after all. ‘Come on, you’re a veteran of this world-hopping crap by now. You should at least be able to tell which world you’re heading to.’

‘Mokona does _try_ to get back to Clow Kingdom as much as possible,’ Mokona said, patting anxiously at Syaoran’s face. ‘Mokona does her best, but this is how Mokona was built. The jumps are _supposed_ to be all mixed-up.’

‘I know,’ Syaoran reassured her, very gently, and gave her a small, rueful, painfully lonely smile. ‘We’ve already been cheating pretty badly using the President’s help: we’ll have to redress that eventually. I’ve spent so much of the past few months here that it’s likely I won’t be able to return to Clow for well over two years once this is all done.’

The rain redoubled. Stamping his feet in the mud, Kurogane gave a heavy sigh and began, very pointedly, to wring out the folds of his cloak. Syaoran flushed and quickened his pace, keeping the shelter of the walls: but as they were walking, Kurogane took the time to settle his hand very briefly on Syaoran’s shoulder.

‘I’ll sort this out, you know,’ he said, trying not to sound as though he were saying anything too important. ‘Doesn’t matter how long it takes me. I’ll stick around until I’m sure this place is safe. You won’t have to worry when you move on.’

Syaoran looked up at him: not nearly so far as he had had to while still a child, but a good way yet. His face was strong-jawed and scarred and weathered by the sun and the wind of a thousand worlds, but those wide brown eyes remained guileless and forthright as ever. ‘I know,’ he said, simply, as the rain poured grey around them both. ‘Thank you for coming. I’m sure you’ll be able to go home soon.’

Kurogane grumbled loudly in his throat, fairly snatched his hand back: shrugged the folds of his cloak closer about his shoulder and strode ahead. ‘Don’t get sappy on me, kid,’ he snapped over his shoulder. ‘I needed a vacation, anyway. That fool of a blond was driving me crazy.’

‘Crazy with _love_!’ Mokona sang, so that Syaoran laughed aloud, then clapped his hand over his mouth, covered it with a cough. Kurogane categorically did not blush.

The high priest met them just inside the tall palace doors with an apologetic smile and a pair of warm towels. ‘Good morning, sire,’ he said to Syaoran, ‘and good morning, Kurogane-sama. We’re very honoured to have you back in Clow Kingdom. I must apologise for the weather.’

‘What, so it’s your fault it’s pissing down out there?’ Kurogane grumbled, holding the towel between finger and thumb and squinting at it. ‘No? Then don’t apologise.’

‘Thank you, Yukito-san,’ Syaoran said, relaxing visibly as the priest smiled and touched his arm in greeting: Mokona clambered up the folds of Yukito’s robes and cuddled up against his cheek, cooing. ‘How long has it been since I left?’

‘Not more than two days,’ Yukito said, nudging the door open with one shoulder. His gentle face was a good deal more drawn than Kurogane had last seen it, the shadows under his eyes considerably darker. Kurogane recognised from unpleasant experience the first signs of magical exhaustion, and made a note to smack some sense into him later on. ‘The rain has been unbroken. No disturbances.’

There came from the back of the long high hallway a flurry of echoes: small footsteps and small voices, a high laugh. Syaoran’s head went up, and a brightness came into his eyes. Kurogane braced himself.

‘Papa!’

‘Papa’s back! Hi, Papa!’

‘See, I told you! I told you he comes back quicker now! I _told_ you.’

A fat child ran headlong into Kurogane’s legs. ‘Ow,’ it said, and rapped sharply on Kurogane’s kneecap. ‘You’re in the way, Kuro-jiichan! Bad Kuro-jiichan!’

‘It’s Kurogane, you moron,’ Kurogane snapped at the child, and nudged it gingerly aside with the hilt of his sword. Quite unoffended, it launched itself at Syaoran and swarmed up him with all the diligence of a young monkey.

‘I win!’ it proclaimed, and began to pull at Syaoran’s hair by way of a victory dance.

‘Hello, Rindou,’ Syaoran said, with a long-suffering sigh. ‘Is that jam you’re putting in my hair?’

‘Probably it’s treacle,’ a small girl said helpfully, appearing out of nowhere behind Kurogane and clapping her hands when he gave a yelp of surprise. ‘Haha, I scared Kuro-jiichan! Ten points for me!’

‘Don’t be rude to Kurogane-san, Anzu,’ Syaoran said, as Yukito took pity on him and lifted Rindou from his shoulders: pulled a kerchief from his pocket with the long-practiced air of one who has had to deal with a good many jammy toddlers over the years and began to wipe the small boy’s face. ‘Come on, be a big girl and say hello properly.’

But before manners could be observed, there came a loud cooing sound and a sudden volcanic eruption from the folds of Syaoran’s cloak, and Mokona leapt into the girl’s arms, squeaking, ‘Anzu-chan! Anzu-chan! Kisses for Anzu-chan!’

‘Moko-chan!’ Anzu cried, spinning around and giggling. ‘Hi, Moko-chan! I missed you!’

‘Oh, sure, she saw that thing two days ago but it gets manners,’ Kurogane muttered to Syaoran, who flushed somewhat. ‘This is exactly why I never had kids. Look, can we get a move on here? Standing around in the dark never got anything done.’

So they set off through the echoing half-dark of the palace hallways, which, though lit here and there by dim yellow lamps and warmed by heavy tapestries pulled across the wider windows as makeshift curtains, were for the most part sunk in the gloom of the rain: which fell driving and relentless through the windless morning and slicked the sun-baked bricks blood-red. Yukito and Syaoran took well-practiced turns hefting Rindou from arm to arm as they conferred in quiet tones that were not meant for Kurogane. The girl Anzu, now something like eight years old and dark-haired as her grandmother, round face tanned and small shoulders liberally freckled, jogged industriously in order to keep up with Kurogane’s long stride, with Mokona clinging to the hem of her cloak and cackling with delight.

‘Kuro-jiichan! Kuro-jiichan!’ she insisted, until Kurogane gave in and snapped _what?_ ‘Can I see the dragon sword? Can I use the dragon sword? Please? I’m old enough now!’

‘You’re an infant,’ Kurogane informed her. ‘Ask me again when you’re taller than a mouse.’ Something sank in then. ‘Wait, _what_? Who said you could call me jiichan, you tiny hooligan?’

‘Fai-san did,’ Anzu said. ‘In the mirror last time, he said it was your new favourite name.’ She considered him. ‘You look cross. Why? Did you like Kuro-wanwan better?’

The throne room was rather better lit than the surrounding passages, and the gold-laid star-maps written into the red floor glinted with flecks of jasper and carnelian. The audience benches built into the walls had been warmly equipped for the rainy season with cushions and rare furs from the north: but no one had come to seek audience with the Queen for weeks, and a low flat table had been hauled into one corner, the better to house several maps, an indiscriminate heap of books and scrolls and compasses, and what appeared to be a mechanical bird in a cage. Sprawled here on a heap of cushions was the queen’s brother Touya: a tall, sturdy man who, being unlikely to produce any  heirs and not particularly interested in ruling in any case, had quietly abdicated in favour of his sister after Fujitaka’s death some years previously, and was now captain of the palace guard. At his side sat his mother, straight-backed and clear-eyed despite her advancing age, her white hair braided into a precarious coronal and delicately veiled. She rose to meet Syaoran and took him briefly into her arms, pushed the damp hair from his eyes with a worried little frown. He kissed her cheek: reassurance passed wordless between them.

‘Lady,’ Kurogane said to Nadeshiko, bowing his head, so that she smiled: and then, ‘Hey,’ to Touya, with whom he had an Understanding.

‘Hey,’ Touya said back, then grabbed Anzu deftly by the shoulder as she dashed past the table, intent on pursuing Mokona: got her up into his arms so that he could look her firmly in the eyes. ‘Come on, kid, what did I say about running near the maps?’ he asked her.

‘If I knock ink on them again you’ll feed me to the sand-worms,’ she recited, dutifully, and huffed out a great sigh. ‘Mama says you lied about there being sand-worms _anyway_.’

‘Oh, there are sand-worms alright, and they’re always very hungry for naughty children - and that goes double for you, little one,’ Nadeshiko said, scooping a squirming Mokona out of a pile of scrolls and depositing her cheerfully into Kurogane’s hands. ‘There you go, Kurogane-san! You and Mokona have _such_ a special bond that I’ll just have to appoint you her Official Protector. Your chief duties involve keeping her _out_ of the spellbooks, if you please.’

‘Special bond my _a_ \- I mean, ah,’ Kurogane stammered, flushing somewhat at Nadeshiko’s raised eyebrow, ‘yes, Lady.’

Yukito entered, moving slow so as not to wake Rindou: whom Nadeshiko took from him and settled carefully on a pile of cushions. Anzu pulled a face and wriggled in Touya’s arms. ‘Everyone’s so _mean_ ,’ she said, wretchedly. ‘Yukito is mean and Touya is mean and Kuro-jiichan won’t even give me a sword. I want a sword! If I had a sword you wouldn’t be so mean.’

Yukito laughed tiredly, but Touya flicked her on the nose. ‘Someone has to discipline you, little monster.’

‘Touya, don’t be unkind,’ a voice called from across the chamber. ‘She’s hardly a monster, but she is _very_ little.’

Chucking Mokona unceremoniously over his shoulder, Kurogane turned to find that while they had all been engaged in toddler-wrangling, Syaoran had crossed the starry floor with slow and steady step to kneel before the high throne of the High Queen of Clow, a woman of immense magical power and political might who was currently engaged in trying to get her sleeping twelve-month-old’s hair to lie flat.

Anzu leapt from her uncle’s arms and went sprinting away with a sudden whoop to clutch at her father’s hand and tug him up the steps to the throne: where she said, ‘Look, Mama, look, Papa’s back!’ and then, upon seeing the baby, ‘Suiren’s drooling again.’

‘Suiren is still a baby and needs his sleep,’ the Queen told her, putting the child into Anzu’s arms, ‘whereas you are not a baby at all, and need to learn some responsibility. Now, will you take him to Saya-san for me, please? _Carefully_.’

‘Yes, Mama,’ Anzu sighed, settling her brother on her shoulder.

‘Thank you, Aa-chan,’ the Queen said, leaning to kiss her hair, then giving her a gentle push to start her climbing cautiously down the steps.

Still bowed very low on one knee, Syaoran looked up into the Queen’s face. ‘You’re certain she won’t drop him again?’ he asked her.

Even from twenty feet away, Kurogane could see how the Queen went bright pink. Her formidable presence was dependant in equal parts on both the gravity and the grace in her bearing, both the result of the long years of discipline that had tempered her unsurpassed strength of magic. Decked out in rosy cottons and crowned with a thin starry fillet of gold, she was very nearly a stranger to Kurogane: but when she looked at Syaoran, there were still moments in which Kurogane was quite certain that she was fourteen years old again.

‘ _No one_ has ever dropped him _at all_ ,’ she said, quite hastily, to which Syaoran simply laughed and nodded: took her hand into his own and kissed it in a gesture of fealty.

‘Majesty,’ he said, by way of formal greeting, and then, when she raised him up, went to take his place at her right hand as Prince Consort and Pilgrim of the Realms, where he stood tall and unharried for her sake despite the lonely weight of his wanderings.

This, then, was the royal family of Clow. Nadeshiko quite practically bundled the sleeping Rindou up in her own cloak, then gathered up a selection of scrolls and began sorting through them: Touya said something quiet and stern to Yukito, then took him by the arm and guided him to sit down, drew his head down onto his shoulder. They all of them had their place. It was with a deep and terrible embarrassment of feeling, which calamity he usually only associated with Fai having said something particularly disgusting, that Kurogane approached the throne, keenly aware of the love that welcomed him in after five years’ absence and not quite sure how to hold it.

He knelt before the throne, thinking of Tomoyo and missing her sharply, and took a moment’s refuge in good, old-fashioned ceremony before drawing a deep breath and glancing up into that calm powerful face. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘You know your kids are annoying as hell, right?’

Sakura beamed. ‘Hello, Kurogane-san!’ she said. ‘It’s so good to see you again!’

 

* * *

 

The vice-captain of the Queen’s guard was a very young woman named Karura: a strange girl with pale hair and rainy eyes, a particular belligerent set to her chin. Kurogane had known of her, and had seen her once or twice before in the mirror, but now that he had met her in person, he could not quite decide whether or not he liked her. He resolved to spend the next few days shouting at her until he worked it out. She seemed to be in cahoots with the captain, who greeted her with a friendly cuff upside the head when she arrived in the small counsel chamber south of the solarium and dodged the blow she aimed at his shoulder with something that almost approached a grin.

Outside, the sharp dark leaves of the many date-palms at the castle heart shivered in the rain: Kurogane did not have to look further over the great round-bellied balcony to know that the carpet of succulents that grew there would be starred bright with new blossoms of gold and purple. Shaking his shoulders and drawing his cloak closer around himself, he stalked back into the relative shelter of the little counsel chamber. Even with the many golden lamps ranged all around, the high walls, clammy in the cold and swimming with a perpetual echo of rain,  lent to the place a curious sense of being underwater. It was all wrong, Kurogane grumbled to himself. Clow Kingdom was a place of windstorms and white air and a heat so heavy that it knocked you back when you stepped out of the door. He turned to Fai to complain, then found that he was not there

‘Kurogane-san, right?’ the girl Karura asked, setting one casual hand to the hilt of her sword as she took up her place at Touya’s side, while Yukito and Sakura moved to the head of the long table, working together to unroll a heavy map that showed the bulk of the desert and the regions beyond. Syaoran hung back, close to the windows as he could get without moving too far from Sakura. Twenty years of wandering had gotten into his blood, Kurogane knew: he would never settle again, not though he longed to, and would forever be one footstep away from starting a new journey out of sheer force of habit.

‘Yeah,’ Kurogane said in answer: checked, ‘Karura?’ by way of return greeting, was rewarded with a swift, curt nod. Touya’s mouth hooked up into a grin that was almost proud. ‘Dunno how much use I’ll even be to any of you,’ Kurogane added, considering her straight shoulders and raised chin: too stiff in every way, the bearing of a very young soldier to whom careful posture was still a conscious and continual effort. He had been young like that once. ‘I’m just - I’m just here to be a sword and a good set of eyes.’

‘Any advice you can give us will be a great help,’ Sakura said, quietly, looking up to pierce him through with those green eyes. ‘What has Syaoran told you?’

‘Not an awful lot. You got bandits, right?’ He was watching her closely as he said this, and the brief flicker in her face confirmed his suspicion that _bandits_ had, in fact, been a euphemism. ‘Tell me about your defences first. I got the general idea from the kid, and the way he made it sound, what you really need is numbers. Hell, there’s a mage I know would likely have been more use than me, ’cept he’s busy. This kind of thing, you need wide-scale offensive capabilities. You’re holding wards over the castle, right, Majesty?’

He had not been told this either, but he knew all the same: the signs of magical exhaustion, though not as prominent as in Yukito, were evident all the same in the sharpness of her cheeks, the shadows beneath her eyes. She did not seem surprised, but nodded slowly.

‘See, you’re already being useful,’ Karura put in then, loud and brisk. ‘Yeah, the queen’s got the entire city under a heavy circle of protection. You came down just inside it, from what I hear. Don’t worry about that - any inter-dimensional travellers not carrying the Consort’s magical signature gets rebuffed to outside the wards, just beyond the ruins.’

Kurogane nodded. ‘And the high priest?’ he asked, looking to Yukito.

‘I’ve been working alongside the queen,’ Yukito explained. ‘Kurogane-san is right: more magic-users would be ideal, but that’s true of any situation, and we don’t _have_ anyone else.’ Forestalling Kurogane’s next question, he added, ‘We’re looking at forces of six hundred foot from within the city proper, as well as three thousand all told in auxiliary troops drawn from the larger towns. The Queen has drawn all those from the smaller outlying villages into the safety of the shields - there are perhaps four thousand refugees inside the wards, in a barracks behind the city. The larger, more defensible towns had been putting together their own garrisons since the attacks began over a month ago, but it’s only since the full-scale affronts have started breaking out that we’ve had to mobilise to this degree.’

Kurogane was already frowning. ‘That’s a hell of a lot of reorganisation to deal with a few bandits,’ he said, as the rain redoubled suddenly with a thunderous roar. ‘Back up and explain this from the beginning. Tell me how it started, tell me who’s in charge of them, tell me how many they are.’

Here Sakura looked to Syaoran. He pushed himself off the wall and drew from his pocket a small disc of some pink enamelled stuff. It was stamped with what Kurogane recognised as a Piffle Princess logo, and so he was unsurprised when at the touch of a button the thing began to hum. A wavering square of light, not unlike Mokona’s communication screens, flickered into life six inches above the disc. Syaoran laid it on the table, poked at a few more buttons. ‘This is their leader,’ he said: pushed the projection towards Kurogane, who studied it briefly. A man, sandy-haired and sun-scarred, who wore a pair of delicate round-rimmed spectacles and a serene smile. ‘We don’t know his name. This is his second, also unknown.’ The picture quivered and changed to show a dark-haired woman, unsmiling as she glanced over her shoulder, reins clutched in her fist. It was badly blurred; Kurogane supposed it could not have been easy for Syaoran to catch a picture of her, however the little device worked. ‘She leads their smaller human looting contingent, who go in after the initial assaults and take supplies. He leads the primary, ah, the primary troops. That’s their pattern - attack a town, drive everyone out, then gather weapons and supplies, fire the houses, and leave.’

Kurogane nodded, starting to understand. ‘Where’s their base?’ he tried, expecting the brief shake of Syaoran’s head. ‘Right, so do we have a - a map of some kind? Showing all their attacks?’

For answer, Sakura gestured to the map she and Yukito had unrolled. It was lettered with the flowing boustrophedon script of Clow, which Kurogane could not read, but the legend was clear enough all the same: a red mark for each assault in a scattered pattern to the north-east, each appended with a numeral similar enough to the suzhou system for Kurogane to be able to understand that they represented the order in which each attack had occurred. Although the first four were grouped in a close semi-circle in the far east, as he had expected, the remaining fifteen seemed randomly arrayed across a far broader area than should have been possible.  He spent several minutes looking for a pattern before he understood.

‘You’ve seen it, right?’ he asked Syaoran.

Syaoran, who had been watching him closely all along as though waiting for him to confirm an opinion of his own, nodded. ‘They’re not attacking from any one specific location,’ he said. ‘Normally, with a small group, you’d see the earliest targets laid out in a ring around their base: then, as their resources grew, they’d either expand to multiple bases or move on in a single direction. These attacks are far too widely-spaced for them to be working from only from one area, and much too random. We thought for a long time that they were using  multiple bases, but they seem to have only one relatively small force, and their numbers don’t vary, so -’

‘Magic,’ Kurogane said. Fai would have seen it right from the start, and would have been more help. He rapped the map with a knuckle distractedly, stood back. ‘Has to be. They’re got some kind of jumping capability. You were right to get people inside the queen’s wards.’ He looked to Yukito, as well as to Mokona, who was perched on the priest’s shoulder, the better to nuzzle at his thin cheeks from time to time. ‘What, you can’t get a fix on it yet?’

‘We’ve been trying,’ Yukito said, as Mokona nodded and patted his ear supportively. ‘It’s not easy. Their magical signature is - odd, and difficult to track. At most we can sometimes predict their next appearances.’

They needed Fai, and badly. ‘Alright, alright, we can’t work that out, we go for the next best thing. What do they take?’

Here Sakura spoke, fingertips pressed delicately to the map. ‘Horses and supplies. They don’t kill people, or at least very rarely: just leave them homeless. As Syaoran said, they torch the houses and they take horses, take weapons and armour, but there have been no reports of hostages. The human members of their force all seem to belong to the same band, and they’ve been with him from the beginning, perhaps fifty of them, all in matching uniforms. No one from Clow has joined him so far as we can tell.’ A momentary note of pride came into her voice as she said this. ‘They’re not _from_ here. No one recognises them. No one even understands what language they speak.’

‘You been hit with any kind of requests yet?’ Kurogane asked. ‘Any kind of - demands for something?’

‘No?’ Here Sakura frowned.

‘Why would we?’ the girl Karura asked, blinking.

Kurogane shot a glare at her, which she returned in equal measure. _Kids_ , he thought, irritably: hitched his shoulders, rubbed at the artificial arm. The elbow was sticking slightly in the cold. ‘They’ll want to talk,’ he explained, in a loud, clear voice, because he knew that he was right and wanted no arguments from upstart young soldiers. ‘Whatever this is, they’ll want to _talk_. This is someone trying to get your attention. If you hadn’t had the wards in place right from the start, I think you’d have had some negotiations opened by now.’

‘We don’t negotiate,’ Sakura said with a great firmness. ‘To drop the wards is to leave ourselves vulnerable to attack.’

‘Not criticising you for that,’ he said, and very nearly added _hime_ afterwards purely out of habit. It was difficult to remember how old she was, sometimes: but he never forgot that she was not, in fact, the small girl whom he had called _hime_ in a hundred different worlds, and who had walked through acid to save her family. For a moment the sound of the rain outside seemed far too loud and very bitter. He shook away the memory, reminded himself sternly of where he was and why. The queen was as much his daughter as that girl had been. ‘Was smart of you,’ he allowed her. ‘You keep the wards going, you and the priest both - you keep things safe here. We go out. We make ourselves known. Doesn’t matter if we can’t tell where they’re going to strike: we make ourselves visible, draw ’em out, hear their story: hear their demands, then tell ’em to go to hell.’

The small room stirred in surprise. ‘I suppose - the more we know about them, the better,’ Syaoran said, doubtfully. His gaze met and held Sakura’s for a moment: then they both nodded, as though they had finished a long and complex conversation. ‘We won’t give into their demands, not at the cost of Clow Kingdom’s safety - we must show them that we are not weak - but perhaps if we simply knew their motives, we might find that there’s a peaceful solution to all of this.’

‘Who said anything about peace?’ Karura and Kurogane demanded at the same time, then glared at each other again. ‘You brought me here to knock some heads in,’ Kurogane added, loudly, feeling the sudden need to remind the girl that he was the veteran here. ‘I’m not sitting around on my ass during _peace_ _talks_.’

‘I wouldn’t worry, Kurogane-san - you’ll very likely have your chance to knock _some_ heads in, at least,’ a voice said from the doorway. ‘You see, there is the small matter of their soldiers’ not being human.’

Nadeshiko entered, carrying under one arm a long narrow box of black stone. It was heavily warded with magic so powerful even Kurogane could see it, and when she settled it down onto the table, runes crackled and flared gold at the corners, steaming slightly in the chilly air. Nadeshiko raised her staff and swung it down in one short, neat stroke that unwrote the wards: set the staff aside and flung out her arm to prevent Kurogane from leaning in. Everyone else had taken several steps back and tensed as though waiting for an attack. The box gave a sudden rattle.

‘This is all we’ve been able to salvage,’ Nadeshiko said, easing the heavy lid carefully aside. ‘Have a look, Kurogane-san - but please, be careful. They don’t die.’

 

* * *

 

That evening, as the rain droned on, Sakura and Syaoran brought the mirror into the small warm guest room where Kurogane had hung up his cloak. The two older children had been successfully coaxed into their beds after a record number of bedtime stories, and only the baby Suiren remained grumbling and wakeful.

‘Saya-san has the evening off,’ Sakura was saying to Syaoran over Suiren’s complaints. ‘I know it’s short notice, but her littlest one is a bit feverish. Would you - would you mind? He’s a very grumpy baby recently, and he doesn’t really settle unless someone walks him.’

‘Oh - oh, not all,’ Syaoran said, looking frankly delighted to be handed a fussy baby. ‘I’ll take him to see the garden. Don’t worry, I’ll keep him wrapped up nice and warm.’ Suiren gave a gurgle and batted at Syaoran’s face: Syaoran caught his hand on a finger. His face shone with such open delight that Kurogane had to look away with a small tired smile, feeling old and full of thoughts Fai would only have teased him for. ‘I won’t drop him, either,’ Syaoran added, as an afterthought.

‘ _No one has ever dropped him_ ,’ Sakura snapped, going pink. ‘G - g - go away! M - me and Kurogane-san are going to talk to Fai-san now, so you just - _you_ don’t drop him!’

Syaoran kissed the corner of her eye, grinning, and turned for the door, humming under his breath a lullaby that he had learned long ago from Fai. Still blushing, Sakura crossed the room to sit at Kurogane’s side,  laid her mirror out carefully on the low writing table. It was almost the twin of the one that kept Fai kept in its cherrywood box in Suwa, save that it was enamelled with the emblem of the wings, which Kurogane supposed was the President’s way of keeping track of which mirrors had been distributed into which worlds. Sakura touched the controls located discreetly among the ormolu workings along the rim, sat back on her heels: bit at a thumbnail in a most unqueenly fashion.

‘So you dropped the kid, or -?’

‘I did not!’

A  holographic interface sprang into the air and displayed a loading loop, flickered and coalesced with unsettlingly realistic clarity into the image of a room in the household at Suwa. It was as though a round window had been opened in the wall. There on the other side, close enough to touch, were the long wooden floors, the screen doors, a glimpse of the garden stained red with dawn: and, quite suddenly, the edge of a bare white shoulder. Fai shrugged his kimono into place, yawning, and stuck his tousled head into the picture. Kurogane’s heart lifted.

‘Evening, Fai-san!’ Sakura said, clearly trying her best to look the composed and precise opposite of the sort of person who dropped babies. ‘Look, Kurogane-san got here safely!’

‘Hi, Sakura-chan!’ Fai said, a faint buzz underlying his voice as the image jumped and stilled. He stretched and gave another great yawn. ‘Is he being a naughty puppy and eating all the food? Just give him a good whack across the nose with a newspaper if he starts chewing any slippers.’

‘No, no, no, he’s being a really great babysitter!’ Sakura stammered hastily. She went pink in the face all over again as she looked to Kurogane with anxious eyes, as though horrified that he would feel unwanted. ‘The children are so excited to have him here!’

‘They made me tell them stories,’ Kurogane muttered in tones of horror. ‘ _Stories_. Don’t you laugh, you bastard! I had to tell them Momotaro, for God’s sake! And then -’

‘And then Anzu wanted to be the bird, and she tried to make a monkey costume for Rindou,’ Sakura said. ‘You’d have been really impressed with her sewing! But, you see, they wanted Kurogane-san to be the puppy-dog, so -’

Fai clapped his hands. ‘Ah, Sakura-chan, you have taught your children wisely,’ he said. ‘Were there ears? Please tell me there were ears.’

‘Kurogane-san looked very handsome in them,’ Sakura said stoutly.

From behind them there came a small knock at the door, and Karura peered carefully around the doorway. In her arms was a tearful Anzu. ‘Sorry to interrupt, Majesty,’ she said, after a curious glance at the projection, ‘but Aa-chan had a nightmare again.’

Sakura stretched out her arms, and Karura crossed the room: Anzu flopped over into the proffered hug and fell asleep almost immediately, dimly muttering, ‘Bad robot men.’

‘Oh, poor love,’ Fai said, fondly.

‘I’ll take her back to bed,’ Sakura said, getting to her feet and heaving Anzu up onto her hip. ‘Thanks for looking after her, Karura-chan. Would you mind going to find Syaoran for me, please? He should be in the gardens.’ To Kurogane she added, ‘Keep on without me. It was nice to chat, Fai-san.’

Fai waved: but, ‘Hey,’ Kurogane said, as Karura ducked obediently out of the door and Sakura turned to go: ‘hey, Majesty?’

‘What is it?’

He wanted to tell her that he could see the exhaustion in her every step: he wanted to tell her that she was fragile: but she was a queen and a mother both, one of the most formidable forces he had ever known and the wisest, and he trusted her to see to herself. Besides, he knew that the weight of a kingdom’s wellbeing hurt worse to shrug off than it did to carry. ‘You get some rest too, you hear?’ he said, finally.

He got the idea from the way she smiled that she understood: stooping, she dropped a kiss onto his head, then left, Anzu snoring softly on her shoulder. Flushing, Kurogane turned back to the projection on the wall to find that Fai was regarding him with an expression that somehow managed to stand midway between self-satisfied mirth and a tenderness so abiding that Kurogane’s heart clenched in his chest.

‘You got a problem?’ he snapped.

‘None whatsoever, Kuro-jiichan,’ Fai said, smirking only slightly. ‘So! How long is it since you left?’

‘Only been a day here.’

‘Unfair! It’s been six days for us. See, look, it’s morning.’ Fai yawned again and gestured to the light spilling in over the floor. Kurogane knew how that same light touched Fai’s pale skin with bloody fingers every morning: had grown used to waking to Fai curled beside him, shining like a creature of red glass, each strand of golden hair illuminated. He wanted to put out a hand and run his thumb down the nape of Fai’s neck. The projection jumped again. He tapped his thumb on his knee. ‘Six tragically lonely days,’ Fai was continuing, rubbing a sleepy hand through his hair, ‘during which I went mad with grief and took up with a travelling minstrel to slake my lust.’

‘Still evening here,’ Kurogane said, ignoring this last. ‘Been going through the records of all the attacks in the past month. Not that much to go on, but we’re heading out tomorrow anyway, probably. The kid doesn’t have all that much time here, so we can’t just hang around. I won’t be near a mirror for about a week my time.’

‘ _Tragically_ lonely,’ Fai insisted. ‘He was _very_ amorous, you know, quite insatiable, a manly manbeast with broad shoulders and exceptionally good manners. Never tracked mud in over the floor, not even once.’

‘Touya’s not bad, I don’t mind having him around, but his second in command is just some kid. Don’t really know what to make of her yet.’ Kurogane frowned. ‘Did you just say _manbeast_?’

‘He reminded me of a certain ninja fellow I once knew - oh, what was his name? Kurocchi? Kuro-rin? He was horribly rude and ran away, leaving me all alone and _desperately_ in need of a good -’

‘Shut your filthy mouth,’ Kurogane advised him, casting a glance over his shoulder towards the door.

‘Make me,’ Fai suggested, waggling his eyebrows.

Kurogane gave him a long look. ‘Wait till I get back,’ he said, softly.

Fai held his gaze. The sunlight blazed in his hair. ‘Alright,’ he said, then leaned in, momentarily serious. ‘Do you need my help?’

Kurogane considered it a moment longer than he would have liked to admit, still tapping his steel fingers distractedly against his knee. ‘No,’ he said, finally. ‘Not yet, anyway. That priest of theirs isn’t in the best way, so maybe - but not for the moment. You stay where you are.’

‘Well, you’re a grumpy old nuisance with no manners most of the time, but I suppose you do keep your promises,’ Fai decided, and gave a little nod of his head that Kurogane knew and loved well, as though he had made his decision and found it quite simple. ‘You promised to come back to me. I trust you. If you need me, I’ll be there, but until then, I’ll wait.’

_I will wait_ , he had said, in a cherry tree under the warm morning sunlight, golden hair falling across a golden eye, smiling in grief and in acceptance, the first of many marks of love just visible on his collarbone beneath fine fair sky-bright silk. _It may be painful, but I will wait_. ‘Alright, alright, fine, shut up,’ Kurogane said, heart full and throat tight, and found that he could not look too long on Fai’s face when it was sweet and sleepy and so very far away. He ducked his head, fidgeting, and cleared his throat noisily. ‘Just protect my land, got it? I’ll kick your ass if anything bad happens.’

Fai nodded: threw an exaggerated military salute that he had picked up long ago in some far-off world and nearly fell over. ‘Sir, yes, sir!’ he said, scrambling back up. ‘Well, in that case, I’d best be going. Poor Arashi-chan has been having terrible morning sickness.’

‘You know it’s not funny when you do that, right?’ Kurogane snapped, after a momentary heart attack: then, ‘Wait, what do you mean you’re going? We’re still talking, damn you!’

‘Oh, does Kuro-sama not want me to go?’ Fai enquired, in a syrupy voice that still managed to sound unbearably smug. ‘Oh, that’s so sweet! Does the big bad independent puppy miss little old me, then?’

Kurogane narrowed his eyes in rage, face burning. ‘I do not _miss_ you, you miserable piece of -’ he started, then stopped again as footsteps padded past in the corridor outside. ‘Fine,’ he said, still fuming, but trying his best for nonchalance all the same. ‘Leave. I don’t care.’

Fai giggled, which was nothing short of infuriating, then gave a little sigh. ‘I really do have to go, Kuro-sama,’ he said, apologetically, and reached out a hand as though to touch the projection: stopped with a wry smile, let his hand drop. He said, ‘I’ll see you soon.’

Kurogane could not meet his eyes. He still prickled under sincerity. Fai understood that, which made it even worse in some ways. ‘Yeah, yeah, whatever,’ he said, as though it did not matter: hitched his arm, cleared his throat. It was no use talking to a shadow, not when all he wanted was to have Fai with him. ‘I’ll - you know. I’ll see you.’

He dreamt of Tokyo, as he still did sometimes when it rained, and woke with a start to realise fully for the first time in twenty years that this _was_ Tokyo, or had been, however many hundreds of years ago: that away across the flowering stones in those strange winglike ruins, Fai had once huddled half-blind in Kurogane’s arms and asked to be allowed to die. Those were bad memories, and Kurogane was far too pragmatic to think long on them: they had survived, and they had come a long way since, and there was nothing more to it. Still he could not sleep with the bed so empty and the walls so cold. He rolled over, cross with himself, and heard above the noise of the rain the faint whirr of his arm as the sockets strained. Fai’s enduring strength and unchanging face had never made him feel old by comparison: it was their absence that took its toll on him.

_They don’t die_ , Nadeshiko had said. He had looked into that rattling box, ready to leap in front of the queen dowager should danger present itself. He had seen the thing moving there, seen it flip and flip like a fresh-landed fish: an arm, livid already in many places with decay and stinking, animated still by the complex cage of struts and wires strung all about it, cogs clicking and churning. _We don’t know what they are, but they don’t die_.

He closed his hand around Ginryuu’s hilt and stared at the far wall until morning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologise profusely for the OCs; [stoneflowers](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithops) are real and very pretty; and this isn't actually going to be a zombie story, don't worry.


	3. rede to me my dream

It transpired the following morning, during a brief break in the rain, that Vice-Captain Karura would be accompanying Syaoran and Kurogane as squadron leaders. She appeared shining on the castle steps, sword at her hip, wearing a cloak as blue as the pale patch of air that had opened overhead, bordered in white with the characteristic deckling of the royal family: said, ‘Good morning, Majesty,’ to Sakura with the sincerity of deep loyalty, then, ‘How’s it going, jiichan?’ to Kurogane.

‘Excuse _you_ ,’ he started, but she only clapped him on the shoulder and then stooped down with a loud laugh to catch Anzu, who came running into her arms and clung to her. ‘Ow! Geez, watch where you’re going, Aa-chan!’

‘I’m coming too!’ Anzu said, wrapping her arms tightly around Karura’s neck and refusing to let go. ‘You can’t go away all by yourself! I saw it in the dream - there’s bad robot men, and you _need_ me, nee-san!’

‘Yeah, no,’ Karura told her. ‘You need to stay here and look after your mom, OK? And look after the High Priest, too.’ This last she said with a mischievous grin, since the High Priest and the Captain had just emerged from the doorway.  To Kurogane’s great surprise, she hefted Anzu up unto her hip and went to kiss the High Priest on the cheek, then to hug the Captain tightly, for all the world as if they had been her parents, and she their daughter. ‘Here, you take the baby monster,’ she said, handing Anzu to Touya. ‘Tell her she’s got to look after the Queen.’

‘You’ve got to look after the Queen, baby monster,’ Touya said to Anzu, who stuck her tongue out at him. He ignored this: affecting nonchalance, he gave Karura a small smile and said, ‘See you later, kid,’ even as Yukito said, fretfully, ‘Now, you be a good girl, and you _listen_ to Syaoran-san, understand?’

‘I always do,’ she told him, beaming. ‘You look after yourself, and don’t worry! We’ll be back before you know it.’

‘Alright, alright, let’s get a move on,’  Kurogane said, eyeing the horizon, which stood grey and surly under a wall of cloud: more rain was inbound from the south-east, and from the thickening scent that blew in over the erg and the occasional flicker amid the dimness, thunder was moving with it. He rubbed at his arm, starting down the broad steps: then gave a loud squawk and scrabbled at his cloak as something wriggled against the back of his neck. ‘What the _hell_ are you doing in there?’

‘Mokona was _loving_ ,’ she protested. ‘Because Kuro-jiichan is grumping! And grumping can only be fixed with loving, silly!’

‘Please tell me you’re staying here,’ Kurogane groaned.

‘Mokona has to stay with Syaoran,’ Mokona explained, hopping happily to him as he approached. ‘He has to jump soon! So Mokona has to stay.’

‘Six days isn’t soon,’ Syaoran said: looked back up the steps to where Sakura waited with tremendous patience and complete calm. ‘At least, I estimate we have six days. Still, we’d better not waste it.’ He gestured to Karura, who came striding down the steps to stand at his side, shoulders thrown back: put his hand very briefly on her shoulder, so that she swelled visibly with pride. ‘Let’s go.’

They headed east into the heart of the storm, accompanied by six hundred foot and a baggage train of disgruntled camels whose breath steamed rank in the chill. The rain hurled itself down so loud on the sounding sand that it proved almost dizzying: Kurogane’s ears rang constantly, and his shoulders ached under the weight of water. The arm was largely waterproof, but he kept it pressed close inside the folds of his cloak all the same. They followed the lines of the sand, trudging two abreast through the murk midway up the dune, chancing lightning on the heights but keeping clear of the deeper furrows for fear of flooding. Kurogane tripped over at least three fresh fulgurites. On either side, and far ahead, and far behind, the world fell away into grey. The camel-fat lanterns spat and whistled and stained their globes dark.

They came out of the erg and into a broad hamada on the morning of the second day and found it spread red and gold and green with flowering scrub. The rain was beginning to thin, and came soughing down in a gentle haze: sunlight flickered on the horizon instead of lightning, and every now and then a patch of blue broke through the grey. At Mokona’s direction, they veered a little way north to cut across the stoneflat and came before evening into the foothills of the low ridges. The troops made camp as far up as they could, spreading themselves out between the rushy cascades of rainwater that leapt to the plain.

Kurogane was of the opinion that he could smell a river, even through the rain, and said so: Karura, perched on a rock with her white cloak gleaming in the dark, said, ‘Yeah, the River Ufurat. Just over this ridge, actually.’

‘So what is this place we’re headed, anyway?’ Kurogane demanded, having mouthed her pronunciation over to himself to no avail, since that was one thing that automatic translations never helped. He poked at a sleeping Mokona in irritation: she gave a small purr and burrowed deeper into the crook of his shoulder. ‘The High Priest just gave me some weird-ass Clow name and pointed at a speck on the map. I need more than that.’

‘It’s called Nebi Huri,’ Syaoran reminded him gently, which only made Kurogane scowl all the harder. ‘A trade centre, small but important because of how close it is to the palace proper. I’ve been there once or twice. If they’re following their usual habits, the town _should_ be mostly evacuated, since they’re right on the river and it is flood season - they’ll have a skeleton garrison there, but most of the townsfolk will be up in the caves in the higher ridges on the far side of the river.’

‘So hills, then,’ Kurogane said, nodding up into the echoing darks of the ridge and dislodging Mokona as he did so: she yawned loudly and wriggled into Syaoran’s lap.

‘These hills continue for maybe two hours’ walk, then the river cuts through them,’ Karura explained. ‘The town’s on the near slope. Flows north-west south-east, usually shallow enough to ford so no bridges, but probably in heavy flood right now.’

Kurogane stared out into the rain, trying to visualise it. ‘That could work either in our favour or against us, I guess,’ he decided, finally. ‘Town being on a slope might help. And we’re headed there because the Priest just _thinks_ it’ll get hit next?’

‘He knows what he’s doing,’ Karura said, defensively.

Syaoran made a small sound as though meaning to speak, then appeared to think better of it: blew out a long breath. ‘Their system is quite slow, or at the very least requires a lot of set-up,’ he said, finally, and with a good deal of reluctance. ‘The Queen started picking up odd magical signatures, always in groups of three, as though they were triangulating something. At first she said she didn’t know what it was, but then Yukito said he was seeing the same thing, and then - well, wherever they see them, attacks happen three or four days later.’

Kurogane frowned, rubbed his arm. It creaked and complained under the cold with every breath. ‘Huh,’ he said, which drew a small snort of derision, hastily covered up by a cough, from Karura.

‘It’s not proper magic,’ Mokona volunteered sleepily. ‘It doesn’t feel like _magic_ magic.’ She yawned again. ‘Mokona can’t say what Mokona means.’

‘No, but you can guide us there,’ Syaoran said, stroking her ears. ‘So that’s a start.’

They broke camp well before dawn, moving through a heavy groundmist that rose up out of the hollows of the stone hills, and came by sunrise to the top of a tall ridge thickly covered with some sort of bone-thin thorn, where they stood and looked down the steep slope to a river. The sun broke sullen through the very edge of the cloudwrack and touched the brown waters bloody. It had the momentary effect of outlining with great clarity the fine dark leaves of the flowering scrub and red-edged crassula dotted down the hillside, the golden rubble and sharp stones: the tall walls of sandstone and baked clay that stood in double rings around a town of perhaps ten hundred square houses.

A small west-facing gate, heavily barred, opened into the uppermost segment of the walls, just beneath the crest of the ridge. In addition to this, Kurogane noted as they marched very carefully down the loose sandy slopes, there were at least two small side-gates - one to the north, one to the south, both heavily barred - as well as the main gate at the very bottom of the slope, through which they entered. The recent flooding had left it with its feet wet, and Kurogane could see several mooring-posts a good way out into the waves. The northwestern curve of the river was lost between high cliff walls as it wound away into the mist: the rest of it churned on into the sunrise.

‘Oi,’ Kurogane murmured to Mokona, who was humming softly into his ear for no apparent reason. ‘Oi, meatbun! You picking up that - not-magic stuff? The signals?’

Mokona nodded. ‘Mm,’ she said. ‘From the ridge, in a triangle. It’s going _bnnnn_ , _bnnnnnnn_ in Mokona’s ears.’

‘You tell us as soon as it starts getting stronger,’ Kurogane said, memorising the landscape as best he could before following Syaoran and Kagura away from the murmuring river into the shadow of the walls of Nebi Huri.

Together with a small contingent, the three left the bulk of their troops outside the walls, which was only courtesy, and, after extensive greetings and proofs of identity and all sorts of negotiations with the guards, proceeded widdershins all the way back up the ridge: for the main road, set with wooden boards so that it functioned more as a skinless stairway to guard against sandslides and flooding both, tacked its way crosswise up the slope between sandstone homes, most of which were deserted save for the odd guard posted on the threshold. The place lacked the look of a town wholly abandoned: goats and geese had been left behind with full pails of feed, and muddled sandy footprints were clearly visible on the damp boards. Men and strong women still passed up and down every so often, carrying bundles of weapons or sacks of grain. The rain had started up, though the sun still shone, and the dazzle of it on the golden walls was blinding. Kurogane clicked his tongue, displeased.

Close to the top of the ridge, just inside the southwest curve of the wall (feeling that being disgruntled was good for the constitution, Kurogane grumbled, ‘If we were _just here_ , why did we haul ourselves the whole way down then drag our asses back up?’ and ignored Syaoran’s patient explanations of mudslides and security) a low long building folded crescentwise to the curve of the earth served double duty as a council hall and a small barracks. In a wide room that stood a good third open to the golden mist, they met with the governor of the town, who, dressed in a fine red copper-studded gambeson, was seated at their low writing-desk and consulting with several of their men.

‘Lord Wanderer,’ the governor said, meaning Syaoran, since that was his informal epithet among the people of Clow. Syaoran had blushed when Kurogane had first asked him about it, many years previously, and it had taken Fai’s gentle interrogation of the High Priest to learn that it was, in fact, the cult title of a legendary hero. ‘Welcome back to Nebi Huri. I’m afraid most of us are across the river, but we’ll do our best to make your stay comfortable.’

‘Ashura-sama,’ Syaoran said, giving a very respectful little bow, and Karura with him. Kurogane started, then squinted for a better look. The governor’s narrow face was lined and weathered, their long hair peppered grey, but their eyes shone blazing gold in the rainy sunlight, and now that he had the name, Kurogane supposed that he could see in the graceful set of those narrow shoulders something of the god he had once known. ‘Thank you for your welcome, and for your offer of comfort, but I’m afraid that won’t be our priority.’

Ashura nodded, copper earrings whispering. ‘My men tell me you have concerns for our safety? I must assure you immediately that all the safety precautions the royal emissary specified last month have been upheld, and we’ve had no sightings of bandits at all.’

Karura pulled a bit of a face, and Syaoran, looking much older than Kurogane liked, gave a heavy sigh. ‘My friend, we have reason to believe that Nebi Huri will be their next target.’

There came a slight stir from the three or four other guards present in the room, but they made no comment aloud: they were very trained. Ashura only raised their eyebrows: sat up a little way, all their motions slow and tremendously graceful despite their encroaching age, and considered Syaoran a long while. Finally they said, quietly, ‘I suppose this has something to do with the beacons?’

* * *

The governor’s right-hand man and bodyguard was a tremendously tall old soldier, his white hair offset by his dark wind-eaten skin. Kurogane recognised him vaguely from some world, but could not name him until he noticed the heavy scarring over the old man’s righteye, which brought back the name _Yasha_. He had served under him once, then: the thought made him straighten his shoulders, and he gave the man a respectful nod as he passed him by and took a seat at the table near the window.

Still the rain came steadily down, but the sun never quite vanished behind the clouds, which were thinning steadily, chivvied behind the ridge by the last cold wind the desert would see for a year and away into the northwest. The result was that Kurogane had to keep one arm crooked permanently across his eyes against the glare that hung all across the sky. He used the left, since at least it couldn’t get pins and needles, and squinted irritably at the map of Nebi Huri in front of them.

‘And your attempts to locate these - these beacons have all failed?’ Syaoran was asking.

‘They failed completely,’ Ashura confirmed. ‘They must be shielded or protected in some way - and I’m not even sure they’re physical objects. They could just be concentrations of powerful magic.’

‘I say we use the river,’ Kurogane remarked, stabbing at the greenish squiggle he supposed was the Ufurat with a finger: then voiced an observation he had been mulling over for the past few days. ‘Those dead things they’re using as troops, those - people, whatever they are, they - they got metal in ’em, right? And you haven’t had an attack the whole time it’s been raining, right?’

From across the table, Syaoran chewed on his lip: raised his head sharply to the broad unglazed window opposite, took stock of the sky. ‘Right,’ he said, very slowly. ‘And the rains should stop within the next day.’

Kurogane resisted the urge to swear. To the governor, he said, ‘You said most of your people are up in the hills on the far side, yeah?’ The governor nodded. ‘So, can you get troops up there, too? The closer to the river the better, but still on the slope and well-hidden, and concentrated in a wedge.’

‘What, we don’t want to pincer them in?’ Karura chirped up, quite out of turn, so that Syaoran winced: Ashura seemed at first a little startled, but then their face softened with patience, and they put a gentle hand to the wrist of their bodyguard, who had made a grunt of disapproval at such rudeness. ‘Eh, I guess we don’t have the numbers to risk that, anyway.’

‘No numbers, yeah, and also no one asked you, kid,’ Kurogane told her, sharply, so that her white cheeks flushed pink and subsided. Turning back to Ashura, he repeated, ‘You got any place to hide ’em? And can you get ’em across?’

‘The river slows and widens lower down - there’s a good fording place a half-day’s journey south. We should be able to get them across.’

‘Good. So, half your forces there, the absolute strongest you got. If you’ve got any horse, you send ’em there. We’ll swell your garrison with about a third of our troops so that when these bastards show up they won’t notice you’ve halved your numbers.’

‘Do you think that they would know enough about our numbers to notice that in the first place?’ Ashura enquired, leaning forward and narrowing their eyes as though knowing exactly what Kurogane would say. In their face was the precise same watchfulness that Syaoran had had about him when he had shown Kurogane the map of attacks. Ashura wanted a theory confirmed.

But, ‘I think so,’ Karura put in again: blushed even more heavily when all eyes turned to her once more.

Syaoran was redder than she was, but made no move to rescue her from the ensuing silence, of which Kurogane approved. She needed to learn that if she spoke up, she had better have something good to say. The silence grew worse: everyone waited.

At last, after the silence had become oppressively awful and she had gone red from ear to ear, she burst out, ‘It’s just - well, look, obviously if they’ve already triangulated this place they’ll know _something_ about it, right? And I mean, Lord Ashura said, um, you said beacons, so. Whatever magic’s here - maybe it’s a sensor, maybe it’s getting information.’ She fidgeted, pulling at her fingers, then rallied, saying directly to Syaoran as though in an appeal for him to approve, ‘We can’t assume we have the advantage of being on familiar ground. They could know nothing, sure, but at the same time, it’s better to assume that they know a lot, just in case.’

‘Could you stop being right, damn it?’ Kurogane snapped at her, but without too much venom.

Ashura was looking at her appraisingly, their mouth twisted midway between amusement and appreciation. ‘That would coincide with what we know of the beacons,’ they said, very kindly shifting attention from Karura without condemning her. ‘My magic is predominantly offensive, and I know little of magical theory - I would defer completely to the High Priest’s judgement - but ever since we noticed their signatures three days ago, I have had the uncanny sense that the we were being - well, that we were being _watched_.’

‘From what little we know, that would make sense,’ Syaoran said: then, after flicking his eyes briefly to Kurogane’s, asked, ‘Lord Ashura - you know the land, and probably they do too, so if you don’t mind - tell us, how would _you_ attack this place?’

Ashura raised their eyebrows delicately, pursed their lips a moment: put their hand to Yasha’s wrist once more and tilted their head as though asking a question.

The old man stirred, drew in a deep breath. He had not spoken in all this time, instead standing by in mute watchfulness at Ashura’s shoulder: now he appeared to consider his words a long while. ‘From the top of the ridge,’ he said, finally, in a voice so hoarse and so harsh that Kurogane wondered briefly whether the heavy jet torc at his throat concealed more scarring. He dropped the thought immediately as meddlesome. It was none of his business to know. ‘Logical to approach from the top, especially if you say they don’t like water.’

Karura was nodding excitedly to herself, fairly jigging up and down on the tips of her toes. Syaoran put a hand briefly to her shoulder to quiet her and nodded his thanks to Yasha. ‘You cannot let them take the city,’ he said. ‘Our purpose here is to trap and capture them for questioning, and if they manage to drive you out, they’ll just raid your homes and then evaporate, the same way they have everywhere else.’

‘What you need is to rout them and scatter their forces so that they _can’t_ disappear,’ Ashura agreed. ‘They’ll have to leave _some_ of their people behind. That way you’ll have hostages, and that way you’ll get information. I would advise that you look for anyone who seems as though they’re in charge, then take them and hold them on pain of death. If you want to figure out their aims, then you’ll need bargaining power.’

Kurogane stared down at the map again. He could see it. He’d been brought here more because of his experience than his strength, and this was where his use would be tested. He touched each of the little red-inked side-gates in turn, remembering the crunch of the wet sand under his feet, the glitter of the stones and shining river. He considered the length of the ridge as it wound away north, keeping to the curves of the water: remembered a steep rise he had seen during the climb and the wide flat hilltop behind it.

He said, ‘Here’s what we do.’


	4. make me a wreck

In the thin hours before dawn when the wind flagged and failed, Kurogane woke from a light sleep on rough ground and sat up out of the shelter of his cloak, hand going automatically to Ginryuu’s hilt as he glanced about. The grey landscape was peaceful under the moonlight, which pushed fitful and thin through the drifting cloudwrack: from far below, the noise of the river chugged on, supplemented every so often by a small spatter of rain. A way behind him, camped out in the scrub, were four hundred foot, hidden behind a rise of stone that sheltered them from the sight of the town proper. Syaoran was not with them, having stayed behind inside the walls of Nebi Huri with the remaining two hundred of their troops: Kurogane had charge here.

He sat a while rubbing the ache from his neck and shoulders, thinking idly of Fai’s long tough hands and sturdy touch on chilly days when old scars stung the sharpest: _feeling your age today, Kuro-jiichan?_ He had never been one to take more than five or six hours of rest a night, and much preferred standing wakeful before a battle to letting his limbs stiffen up in sleep: he strode around the riser to where a guard was keeping watch and relieved her, positioned himself beneath a little rocky overhang and from there sat staring down at what little he could make out of the curve of the river, at the few fires still flickering inside the distant walls like stars in the dark.

The mess of deep scars on his back was prickling worse than usual, which he’d always had the nagging tendency to take as a bad sign. He clicked his tongue in annoyance, rolling his eyes at himself, and settled back against the rock as best he could. A burst of half-hearted rain had started up. Fai would have said _Cuddle weather!_ and used it as an excuse to cling. Kurogane remembered the wiry muscle of that narrow back, the calloused skin at the edges of those hands, those slender sharp-boned hips. There was nothing in a thousand worlds he had learned to love more than the feel of Fai’s skin beneath his palms. _It doesn’t matter what happens. I will see you again_. With no warning at all, he grew quite fiercely anxious that, wherever he ended up next and whatever new name he took after he died,  he would make the right choices: that he would not leave so much of himself behind in the dark faceless space between lives that he would fail to recognise Fai on meeting him again. He still wondered, sometimes, whether his father had ever thought that about his mother: whether his father had ever found her again, in some kinder time or friendlier place. He remembered bright hair under sunlight and between his fingers, arms around his neck, that strength and that grace. Surely he would never forget that.

‘How’s it going up here, jii-chan?’ a voice asked, and he only narrowly managed to stifle a yell that would have woken up half the camp.

‘Shouldn’t you be asleep?’ he hissed over his shoulder, glaring up at a pale face in the dark that he supposed, after much squinting, was Karura’s.

‘Boring,’ she said, and nudged at his knee with a toe. ‘Go on, move over.’

He swore under his breath, but made space for her under the overhang, undergrowth crackling. She plonked herself down quite without reservation and leaned back: folded her arms behind her head, kicked her legs out, began to hum something cheerful. ‘ _Kids_ ,’ Kurogane growled, for probably the thousandth time since arriving in Clow, and gave a sigh. ‘You not gonna get cold out in this?’ he asked her, nodding his chin at the sky. ‘You end up with a fever tomorrow morning, I’m not covering your ass.’

‘Nah, the rain’s been an improvement,’ she said: grinned as he hiked a disbelieving eyebrow. ‘No, really, night-time’s actually warmer when it rains. Otherwise we’d be able to see our own breath right now. Clouds at least keep some heat in.’ And then, almost out of nowhere and all in a rush: ‘Look, sorry I wouldn’t shut up today.’

Kurogane said, ‘Hmph,’ and then, ‘Sorry’s not going to change the fact that you were acting like a jumped-up rookie.’

‘I didn’t _mean_ to be embarrassing,’ she insisted, and actually had the grace to sound genuinely repentant. ‘Syaoran already talked to me about it, don’t worry. I know I’m a bit - _much_ , sometimes. ’

Kurogane snorted. ‘A bit.’

‘Hey, I’m apologising here!’ she said, and jabbed at him with her elbow.

He found himself grinning into the dark, and stopped. ‘They were good questions,’ he allowed her. ‘You don’t need me to tell you that you got a good head on your shoulders, ’cause you already know that. Need to know when it’s your turn to talk, is all.’ She made a small noise of discontent, a _pfft_! of breath, and rearranged herself like a grumpy bird under rain: the folds of her cloak fell back, and the sword at her hip glinted in the moonlight. ‘You mind if I have a look at that?’ Kurogane asked, suddenly curious.

She paused only a moment before pulling it from its sheath and presenting it to him. He took it with respect and held it up to the dim moonlight. It was a mid-length sabre of good steel with a heavy-belled forward curve that gave it the shape of a wing: not at all the sort of sword with which Kurogane had been trained, being as wide as his palm at its broadest point and built for close-range hacking, but pleasing to handle nonetheless. The hilt was of very pale steel, elaborately wrought into the form of a bird’s bowed head, with the bend of the neck forming the handguard and two wings spread for the quillons. Slivers of what looked like mother-of-pearl served as feathers.

‘Good sword,’ he said, handing it back.

‘Not as good as yours.’ There was a wistful sort of envy in her tone, but she did not ask to handle Ginryuu in return. ‘He got a name, that big lizard-head thing? Looks like the kind of sword who’d have a name.’

‘’s called Ginryuu.’ Kurogane was never sure what the translation matrix picked up on and what it didn’t, so he rephrased it as best he could: ‘Means a dragon that’s silver-coloured. And yours?’

‘It was my father’s,’ she said. ‘He didn’t deserve it, so I stole it. It’s mine now. It’s called Garuda.’ She seemed to reflect on the problems of translation in much the same way that he had, because after a moment, she tried, ‘That’s the name of a - of a big bird from the mountains where I grew up, a kind of eagle or falcon, I guess. It’s the old version of my name, the ancestral version, kind of.’

He grinned at that, suddenly, feeling a surge of coincidental kinship: which was a ridiculous thing to feel about ancestral names, but which he found he did not mind.

They fell into a sharp but not entirely uneasy silence after that, the sort shared by both guard-dogs and birds before a storm. She had been right, Kurogane supposed: the rainy cold of the past few nights had lacked the bare brutality of a desert under an open sky, and for the most part the waiting was not so bad. The temperature plummeted only once, albeit very sharply, just before a new wind rose up from the stillness and began to push and push at the rattling scrub: nothing like the rainbearing gales Kurogane had grown used to, but a hard fresh thing out of the north, coarse and dry. The sky lightened to a filmy grey, so that the scrub stood out dark against the air, then began to flush red along the edges. The rain must have tapered off some time during the night, so gently that Kurogane had not noticed: day broke clear save for a fine web of white cloud that hung high overhead. Behind them, the troops were already stirring.

‘Remember,’ Kurogane said to Karura, standing up, ‘we wait for the signal. You know where to go?’ She nodded. He gave her a small push on the shoulder, and her mouth hooked up into a grin: shrugged it off with an exaggerated roll of her eyes, strode away into the morning with a wave of her hand.

The success of their plan depended on their response being both perfectly timed and unexpected, which had prompted the decision to conceal the troops as close as possible to Nebi Huri. Leaving charge of the troops proper to Karura, he readied himself to move ahead as a scout, the better to judge the timing for himself and lead the brunt of the attack. He had called for the sharpest eyes and lightest feet, and found himself with three volunteers: a heavy-eyed old man whose name he had not caught but who carried a bow slung over his back, and two women, one called something like Umi, the other so suspiciously familiar-looking that he was unsurprised when he heard someone yell, ‘Hey, don’t go bashing too many heads in, Ryuu!’ by way of farewell and saw a distinctly bloodthirsty grin cross her face. Only the etiquette he had built up after long years of experience in meeting the same people in different worlds prevented him from asking after her son.

They spread out across the red hillside, moving slow and cautious to their appointed look-out posts. The other three were in desert gear, undyed cheesecloth over brown-studded gambesons of worn red and fallow grey, and so were well-camouflaged: Kurogane had borrowed from Syaoran a paler Clow cloak, but still wore his customary black cuirass underneath, and felt slightly out of place as a result. In the thin morning sunlight, raindrops hung glittering from the many stunted thorn trees: small black lizards, their rainbowed bellies glimmering, had crept out onto all the rocks to stare expectantly up at the sun. Kurogane took up his position behind a the husk of an old lightning-struck tree just north of the crest of the ridge, which would afford him a clear view of both Nebi Huri and the hills to the east - which, judging both by the triangulation pattern of the magical signatures and by simple logic, was just where he expected the enemy to materialise. He glanced to his right, scanning for Ryuu, who was concealed behind a tall spray of yellow-flowering gorse, and then just behind him to his left, where the heavy-eyed man - Haruka, apparently - had hauled himself up into the dappled shade of an acacia and was watching the town walls, back straight and bow nocked.

They waited.

The sun moved gradually across the sky, and the shadows with it: that new harsh wind had pushed the very last of the clouds clear from the sky, and the world was full of light. Within an hour, Kurogane found himself growing uncomfortably warm. The nagging feeling of unease that had plagued him ever since he had woken in the palace remembering rain over Tokyo was growing. He pushed and pushed at the edges of his arm to keep the metal joints limber, focused his considerable attention aggressively on the landscape. He made regular sweeps of the hillsides with his eyes, noting with admiration that Haruka’s stiff pose never once faltered, but saw nothing. It was not until nearly two hours had passed since dawn, and the sun was climbing to mid-morning, that he became very sharply aware of what it was that had been bothering him. No birds had sung all day.

Even as he thought it, the ground shook: just once, almost imperceptibly: barely enough to qualify as more than a tremor by Kurogane’s seasoned Nihon standards. Still he tensed, for earthquakes in Clow were very rare. From far away, he thought he could make out a very faint sound like geese honking. Down along the river, a flock of white ibis that had been wading its green folds took fright and rose calling into the sky. Kurogane frowned, edging forward a little way, flexing his fingers on the hilt of his sword.

There came a sudden very loud sound, almost like a thunderclap, but oddly flattened and far too short. The brilliance of the sunlight made it difficult to tell, but he thought he could see flickers of light flaring up from the streets. Away to his right, Ryuu was looking to him. He shook his head, meaning _hold_ , and edged forward, keeping one eye always on Haruka: whose head went up, suddenly, like a dog scenting blood. He beckoned urgently to Kurogane, who wasted no time, but motioned to Ryuu and sprinted through the undergrowth to Haruka’s side.

‘What is it?’ he demanded, craning his neck up into the branches of the tree.

‘Something’s wrong,’ Haruka said, and even as he did, Ryuu came sprinting up, saying, ‘Not sure, but it looks like - sir, it looks like they’re already -’

She was cut off when from the city there came very suddenly a long, low note, heavy enough to shake the ground: the ringing of a bell. It came again, and a third time, which was not at all the signal that had been agreed upon. The taste of it was bloody as copper on the tongue, and the vibrations rattled Kurogane’s teeth in his head: his arm whined and clicked.

When they could speak again, Ryuu said, quietly, ‘They’re already inside the walls.’

Kurogane rub at his arm, making sure it was still in good working order, then thought very fast. ‘Back to the troops,’ he said to Haruka. ‘Do _not let them move_ , you hear? They stay where they are until the Lord Wanderer leaves the city. You!’ he called to the girl Umi, who was scrambling towards them through the undergrowth. ‘Back to where you were! The second you see our troops leaving the city, not a second after, not a second before, you head back and call for the attack immediately. Same orders as before. Haruka, you go and you make sure they wait for her. _Go_.’

‘And me, sir?’ Ryuu asked, as the others sprinted away, Umi to her vantage point, Haruka back behind the bluff.

‘You’re with me,’ he said, having taken stock of the heavy sword at her hip, and remembering the strength of a red-haired boy in an amusement park twenty years before. He scanned the north wall of the city and saw that, as expected, the gates were still closed. ‘We were counting on an external attack to get the west gates open for us - see, there, they’re still standing. Won’t be too heavily barred, ’cause we wanted them to fall, but you and me are still going to need to get them open.’

‘The Lord Wanderer won’t get them open for us?’ she asked, as they began to stride openly along the ridge with no more thought for secrecy.

Kurogane glanced down at the gates. The din of battle was beginning to pick up, now - he could hear a great deal of shouting, and above it all the clash and screen of steel against steel. Still it seemed strangely self-contained and very distant, the sounds of a paper battle in a puppet-show, fought between shadows with tinfoil swords. His vision had already sharpened with adrenaline, and all the world was beginning to narrow and flatten in the way that he found it often did in the moments just before and just after a fight: he was fiercely aware of such minute details as the ant crawling along the stem of a gorse flower, the particular sharpness of the shadow of a red rock, while simultaneously beginning to feel that he had been detached from the world, no more mortal than a painted figure in a picture.

He said, ‘I think the Lord Wanderer may be otherwise occupied.’

The gates, when they reached them, were not easy to break, for although they had been lightly bolted with the express purpose of allowing an attacking force inside the walls, still they were of good white cedar, iron-studded and heavy. Ryuu wasted no time in unbuckling her sword and launching herself at the wall, which she promptly swarmed with a vigour that left Kurogane feeling his age quite acutely. ‘There’s no guards here,’ she called down, having swung herself up over the parapet. ‘Streets look deserted. Fuck!’ There came the sounds of scrabbling as she ducked down. ‘ _Fucking_ hell, just saw one of those clockwork things. It’s gone now. Look, I can see the bar and it’s not chained down, but I don’t think one person can lift it. You can’t get up here?’

‘Don’t count on it,’ Kurogane growled. ‘Not all of us can climb sheer walls anymore.’

‘Jealousy’ll get you nowhere, sir!’ she called back down, with a crack of amusement in her voice: but when her face appeared over the parapet, it was lined with worry. _One of those clockwork things_. Kurogane saw genuine fear in her eyes. ‘What do we do?’

He considered the gates: put one hand to the sun-bleached wood to test its give. ‘Get back down here and let’s crack it open.’

But before she could, there came a sudden loud crash from away down the slope, and then a long stream of shouting. ‘Shit!’ Kurogane said, even as Ryuu called, ‘Sir, the north gate’s opened - they’re retreating! Our troops are retreating!’

‘We don’t have much time to get this done, then,’ Kurogane said, with aggressive calm: beckoned her back down, handed her sword back to her, stepped back several paces. ‘Aim at the centre. On my mark.’

They struck with what Kurogane privately felt was admirable precision despite their haste. There came a great roar and a loud light like the foaming of seawater and stormwind: she was powerful, he noted, pleased as always despite their pressing surroundings to have encountered good competition. Combined, the force of their blows was enough to shake the gate loose from its hinges - and, by the sound of it, to split the great bolt in two with a resounding _crack!_ She was powerful, but he was stronger still. He glanced over at her and nodded his approval when she gave him a quick half-grin: closed his skinhand hard around Ginryuu’s hilt. He had not lost this strength.

‘Sir, the troops’ll be here in a minute,’ Ryuu said. ‘You wanna wait for them, or you wanna head in?’

Kurogane considered it. Already, he could feel the ground beginning to shake under his feet as the troops closed in: but the air was clear and full of the sweetness of rain sped, and above him a daymoon hung thin and pale. Besides, bad omens or no, he suddenly found that he was curious. ‘What the hell,’ he decided. ‘The others’ll just have to catch up. Let’s get started.’

* * *

The first one took them entirely by surprise not three steps inside the gates. Its speed was such that even Kurogane had barely had time to raise his sword before it was on them: Ryuu, still very clearly unsettled from her earlier glimpse of it, was so jumpy that she managed to catch it a great blow across the chest purely by chance. The force of her strike heaved it round and sent it spinning across the deserted street, so that it hit the wall of the nearby guard-house with an awful _clang!_ of copper wires.

Ryuu clenched her fist in victory, but even before she had lowered her sword, the thing was up and stumbling forward again. Even with one foot clearly broken, it moved at such awful speed that Kurogane could not see it as anything more than a long streak of burning light under the morning sun, a vague blazing cage with something dark and shapeless at the heart. He was ready for it, however, and even as it charged, he swung round and impaled it straight through. Unheeding, it came stumbling forward, jerking itself home to the hilt.

It had, quite clearly, been human once, although the likelihood that it had been cloned flesh, created with no more sentience than required to follow an order, was high. The crime was no less cruel for that. Strung together inside a complex cage of wires and valves that pulled and pulled at the dead greying muscles was the vaguely discernible shape of a human figure, head lolling even with its neck braces, lips rotted away to show shining yellow teeth. The stench that hung on it was so shockingly, repulsively bad that he felt his eyes begin to water. Sickened, he wrenched Ginryuu up, cleaving clean through the wires to split it from waist to skull: then brought the blade back around to slice the thing through from flank to flank. It fell in three parts to the mud with a triple thud. The legs kicked and kicked, copper pistons clicking futilely as the ankles churned up a froth. One of the halves of its torso managed to claw its fingers into the earth and started to drag itself away into the shadow of the wall, where it lay panting shallowly with the lung left whole to it, ribs glistening amid the tangle of golden wires. It was still very much alive.

 ‘It’s true, then,’ Ryuu said, aghast, as she palmed a spray of stinking blood from her eyes. ‘These - the deadworks. They don’t die. I’d heard - but I didn’t think - they -’ She broke off, her lip curling. ‘How the hell are we supposed to fight them?’

He remembered the cool inner chambers of the palace, the rattling box, the dead arm inside all wretched in clockwork, still scrabbling about madly a month after it had been hewn away. ‘They’re already dead,’ he said, heavily: clicked his tongue in disgust at the mess it had left on Ginryuu, bent down to wipe the blade on clean honest earth. ‘Dismember them, leave them lie. It’s cruel, but it’s all you can do.’ He watched her steadily. ‘I don’t like it either,’ he added, ‘but what’s the choice? Either you take them out or they rip you apart.’

Her gaze flickered only for the barest instant: then, ‘Sir!’ she said. The next moment, she had drawn a green-scaled dagger from its holster and sent it soundless across the street. Kurogane did not need to turn to know that she had pinned a deadwork to a wall: he could hear the grate and rattle of its gears on stone as it writhed and writhed to come free.

Thirty steps further down and they had encountered a vast mass of the things. They were horribly quick, and intelligent in a way that was awful to watch, as though they had been programmed like persocoms or automata with a limited but aggressive series of protocols: they could open doors easily and charged in with a swift and markedly military brutality, but, on finding no one inside, seemed to stagger about in mild confusion. They left animals untouched, Kurogane noted: they had been programmed not to waste valuable resources. They seemed to have no method of communication, either with each other or with any governing force. If the town was monitored, it was imperfectly, and through an external device. He clicked his tongue.

‘How do you want to do this?’ Ryuu was just beginning to ask, when Kurogane heard a sound and turned, sword raised: but there, coming up behind him at last, was Karura, and with her the thirty-odd foot who had comprised the bulk of their makeshift forward detachment. Composed of their very heaviest and strongest members, it was as weighty a force as Kurogane had been able to put together without drawing on the precious cavalry reserves - which would, in any case, have been more trouble than any weight was worth on a cross-cut sloping road all choked with mud.

‘Oh, now you show up,’ Ryuu muttered. ‘Who put a rookie in charge, anyway?’

‘Better late than never, sir!’ Karura told her, with a grin and a cheeky salute. Ryuu stuck her tongue out in retaliation.

Kurogane cuffed Karura briskly upside the head. ‘Manners, you,’ he snapped, eyeing the knot of deadworks below: the forerunners had heard them, and had shifted their path, necks craning curious as snakes round every corner. ‘Right, change of plans, you lot,’ he added, to the detachment at large. ‘Target showed up inside the walls, obviously, and the decoy segment must have had no choice but to head out early.’

Rubbing at her head, Karura swore. ‘Did they at _least_ get the side-gates closed first?’ she asked.

‘Going to have to trust that they did,’ Kurogane muttered. ‘The side wings in position?’ A nod. He raised his voice, keeping an eye on the forerunners as he did so: for already three had separate from the pack and were hurtling up the steps at an impossible pace, the sunlight flashing so sharp off their bronze bones as to throw long lines of light all across the narrow shadowed walls. ‘All of you! Shields up if you’ve got ’em, heads down if you don’t! Your priority is containment! Drive them out and funnel them down! Engage on my mark! Three! Two! Now!’

It had been a while since he had been to war. Afterwards, when he had time, he would tally the years and be astonished to find that the time he had spent in battle was smaller than the time spent in peace. Still it was familiar: still he knew the weight of the sword in his hands and trusted his feet to find their ground. A light of bronze blinked in his eyes, but he did not need to see. They joined halfway down the hill, with Kurogane knocking the first down smartly with an elbow to the gut and pitching the second sideways into one of its comrade, tripping another three and sending them slit. Karura flew in after him, so quick and so sure that he could follow the path of her thought: that winged sword swept and struck, taking a torso apart, and then she was wading in, driving them back and back with such surety that they could not stand against her. Kurogane strode after her, bearing down, and through sheer force of will brought his arms up against the host to bar them back: and in behind him came the heavyweight troops.

The idea had been that two strong wings, each led by a hand-picked selection of Nebi Huri locals who knew the streets like a mother tongue, would close in from either side, cutting off any attempts by the enemy to escape after the decoy detachment through the supposedly well-barred side-gates and funnelling the intruders back as best they could onto the main road, where the forward detachment would drive them down and out the front gates. It was a tenuous strategy, and one that would have required from both wings a great deal more conversancy with their manoeuvres than was possible for Kurogane to have considered it a sure thing. Still, their familiarity with the streets compensated well for the strangeness of the tactic, for almost instantly, the deadworks began to bottleneck in the main road, driven back as they were out of each alley and every muddy side-path by knots of shouting soldiers.

Kurogane led the charge as best he could by settling himself in at the very head of the pack. A gnashing thing all teeth and tangled wires bit at him and bit at him: he drove the butt of Ginryuu’s hilt hard into its face, so that the struts tore and the head snapped back to loll against its spine, and seized its wrists when it clawed at him, wrenched them round. The things were easy to break: they did not need to be strong, only immortal. Some kind of immobilising magic would have been best, he thought, running almost idly through alternate options even as he bore down, heavy as he could, or any kind of containment - he had half the notion of putting in a call to the President once this was over, to see whether or not she might be able to sponsor them some kind of plastic barrier of the sort he had seen used on battlefields in the far future. The thing in front of him jerked and went limp, and even while it twitched, he heaved it up off its feet, so that it fell backwards into the stampede and began to flail about wildly, taking out several others of it kind in its confusion.

The stink of them all around was terrible, and the sound they made worse: but stronger than it all, somehow, was the weight of the troops at Kurogane’s back, and the crunch and slip of mud under his heels, Ryuu next to him yelling and swearing and shoving her weight hard against the hoard. He had missed this. It would have gone easier with Fai at his side, but the people of this country did not make for bad allies, and he was strong enough still to hold his own. Somewhere to his right, Karura was running from roof-top to roof-top, waving her sword about excitedly and yelling directions to the flanking troops at the top of her lungs, so that whenever the mass of intruders threatened to break and spill, it was once again contained, pushed inexorably down and down the slope toward the town’s main gates. The sky overhead hung impossibly blue, and in the flat irreality of battle even the corners of the clay-packed roofs seemed to glint under the morning sunlight, the edges of the pillaring clouds overhead to shine sharp like blades.

All of a sudden, something gave, or perhaps an emergency escape protocol kicked, because very suddenly the mass of dead flesh fell back, and Kurogane had to fling out an arm to catch at a man beside him who stumbled as the things turned and began to sprint riverwards. The result was a terrible stampede, and a sight that under the cheerful morning sunlight was almost comical had the things not been so helpless and so grotesque, crashing headlong into each other and trampling the wounded into the mud, until the roads were paved with shining wire and creeping limbs.

‘Check every house!’ Kurogane roared, as the mass of the troops behind him began to break up and surge away down the side-streets to hold the line. ‘Do not let them stay inside the walls! Flush them out and funnel them down, into the river! Check every house! Go!’

Even before he could draw breath, he swung at a dead thing that, seeming to be terribly confused, was staggering toward him on feet that were quite clearly broken, and shore its legs from its body, then separated the head for good measure. Another came at him too quick for him to dodge, and he flung up his arm in defence. The next moment, it had gotten its fingers into his artificial shoulder, and with a shocking deftness had begun to burrow through the simskin to the metal beneath. That jarred him, and badly: he had his sword up on the instant and had sliced it away, brought up a boot that connected squarely with its chest and sent it flying into a wall with a clash of jangling wire. Still the hand that he had severed hung on his skin, and as he wrenched it away, he saw something very like the hydraulic tendrils in his own arm slither back inside their fingers to curl quiescent beneath rotting flesh.

He threw it away like a spider, feeling suddenly cold. He knew of only one world, besides Piffle, where technology like that existed. He had not liked it at all.

Below, the things had slithered their way down the rainchoked roads to the single great gate that opened onto the river: and as Kurogane watched, the bar gave, having been carefully doctored to do so under just the right amount of pressure, and the deadworks went spilling out onto the banks in a great shining morass. He nodded grimly to himself despite his sudden understanding that he might well be far further into danger than he had previously thought, and, with a shout to Karura, beckoned his squadron onwards and down, so that within the space of a minute and a half the frontrunners had reached the gates and were pursuing the deadworks into the flood. The river, green and warm now under morning as yesterday it had been bloody and chill under rainlight, seemed as poisonous to them as had been expected, for immediately they began to slow, and several seemed to crumple where they were, twitching feebly. Water would not short-circuit them entirely, it seemed, but it was a great hindrance.  The smell of water all about almost drowned out the stench of death, so that as he came sprinting down through the rough rainfed scrub, sword raised and sight set, Kurogane could almost pretend that this was a clean battle.

The surge of the tide tugged at his knees as a thousand feet cut the sluggish flow into a churning mass of muddied waves, and the sand gave thick under each step. All around, the struggle gave rise to great plumes of water, resulting in a perpetual rainfall: his eyes were bleared, and the glare all about was so great that he could barely see through the seething press of bodies to the far side. Wet sleeves clinging cool, he raised his sword, droplets falling bright from the blade in an arc of glitter, and set to fending off any stragglers from the gate. He had not been there a minute before the ground began to tremble and the water to roar, as down from the opposite bank, hidden in the high caves, the cavalry came thundering through the morning sun, Lord Ashura leading the charge in armour that flashed bronze across the river. At almost the same moment, the two halves of the decoy segment came surging down the hill on either side of the fortified town in two perfect wedges that struck the water with marvellous precision. They cut the churning crowd with dual lines of battle that spread impenetrable from bank to bank, so that the deadwork forces were split in three, locked into the river by the cavalry and disastrously separated.

From his vantage point holding the gate, Kurogane could see it all laid out before him, every bit as neatly executed as he had hoped. Whatever unseen director had charge of the attacks could not simply transport the deadworks away, not now, not with their forces split in three and mingled in with enemy soldiers moreover: not with half their units malfunctioning badly and unable to regroup, and, of course, reinforcements could not be sent in without similarly exposing them to the river. His eyes went to Syaoran, who mounted on horseback held the left flank firm, and for a moment their gaze met and locked in weary triumph over the surge and press of battle. They had taken an entire army hostage.

*

Fai had said it to him, years ago, while they had been holed up in a tiny glasshouse above some kind of riotously loud shebeen, embroiled in a very complicated game of strip-shougi that had involved a good deal more stripping than shougi, not to mention copious amounts of illegal alcohol. They had long since abandoned any pretence of rivalry, and had taken instead to laying out various scenarios according to a code of their own, each posing in turn a complex question of strategy and challenging the other to solve it. The shadows of the plants had lain strange and tall across the board, the scent of earth and magnolia rich on the back of the throat. There had been a lovemark on Fai’s throat, Kurogane remembered, nestled just above the collarbone: a smudge of glitter above his left eyebrow, a terrible mess of tangles in his golden hair.

 _What do you do, hmm?_ Fai had asked, clicking a last stone into place and leaning his chin on his hand, letting his cotton t-shirt slip further down one thin shoulder. He had learnt the rules not three days previously from a very old man with sharp dark eyes, and had in that time decided that he ought to use his new knowledge to make Kurogane feel inadequate about everything Tomoyo had ever tried to teach him. _This many pawns, all clustered in front of your forces, and both your gold generals unusable holding defence. What do you do?_

 _How did you even get this good this fast?_ Kurogane  had demanded, appraising the lovemark with a professional self-criticism and wondering if he could better it.

 _Magic,_ Fai had said, and let the shirt slip further still. _Don’t think you can get out of answering! What do you do?_

Kurogane, reaching over the board to take Fai’s hand and kiss his wrist in the red light, had said: _Draw out the king._

Now, twenty years later on the other side of reality, thin strips of air peeled apart to pull open a swirling hole in the sky. From it there fell a knotty mass that untangled itself into the a human figure. It revolved neatly in mid-air, so that when it struck the water it found its footing almost immediately, one arm raised in pre-emptive defence, the other swiftly pocketing some small metal device. Remembering a flickering image in a cold clay-walled room, Kurogane recognised her from Syaoran’s briefing session: the woman, her eyes staring ferocious from her dark narrow face, her mouth open in a shout. Her armour was black, as though it had been scorched by fire: her tattered cloak flickered bright like flame.

‘Leave her to me!’ Karura yelled, because apparently she had yet to be disabused of the notion that that sort of thing happened on a battlefield, and went charging off through the water, sword raised.

The woman turned, frowned, and readied in response not one sword but two long black flambards, each one marked red at the hilt as though with blazing coals, and parried Karura’s blow with such remarkable strength that Kurogane found himself nodding in approval. Karura leapt back with a laugh and a splash, her hair flying out bright as a cloud under the sunlight, and ducked low, sped in sharp, caught the woman a glancing blow on the cheek. Her lip curled in annoyance, and she lashed out: but Karura blocked, laughing and laughing as she strode against the tide. So it went on, for they were well-matched in both strength and stupidity. For all that it did not belong on a battlefield, it was a good fight, and one that Kurogane, engaged though he was in beating back the reaching arms of a dead thing already beginning to spasm and collapse, longed to be able to correct: they were both of them very strong and very impulsive, decently trained but lacking true technical mastery. He would willingly have spent a good three hours under the sun in a dusty yard drilling them on their stances, training them to anticipate each blow, block each thrust.

Even as he thought this, however, he became aware once again of that same strange ringing sound, building and building. That rip in the air did not seal itself, only tore wider, until the sky seemed to ripple, and the unfortunate deadworks caught below began to crackle and hiss with some kind of magical charge that arced coppery-bright off the water without electrifying it. Something else had come through.

Five long thin claws, marvellously constructed of bronze and yellowish glass, crept over the edge of the portal and clutched at it like fingers, widening the gap. A second set of talons followed the first, and then a third, until a vast and awful thing like a spider built all of metal and decaying flesh clung from an invisible precipice, its round glassy eyes giving off a sodium glare. It detached, quite suddenly, and leapt into the river with a crash so loud it shook the banks: and ran, full-tilt, straight for Kurogane.

He had thought about it a good deal during the days after his childhood ended, and in unflinching detail, because he could not help but do otherwise: had considered the mechanics of being eaten alive until he knew the explanations for his rage by heart. His father had told his mother that he would come home, and he had, but in pieces. Kurogane had made much the same promise to Fai, and he feared more than fire to keep it in the same way. He had fought to prove that they were not cursed, that they could choose their own fate, and he would fight against to prove it now. He would not die without even a body left to send back.

So he raised his sword, because to his mind there was no such thing as a hopeless fight, and he stood against the spider even as it came charging down against him. He managed to slice through three of those bulbous glassy claws, seeing them spurt some sickly hydraulic fluid, before one of the other arms sent him flying sideways into the water. He landed badly, striking rock with his good arm and skidding several metres through gravel and rivermud before he came to a stop. He clawed his way back up to the surface, coughing and spitting, and was on his feet again even before he could see, ducking effortlessly when he heard the whistle of the incoming attack: but the thing had rather more limbs than he was used to, and seemed to be able to turn and turn again as though on casters, and so he did not anticipate the follow-up blow. Reeling, he kept his feet, but it was a near thing, and he had to haul his sword up and into position, dizzied and uncertain.

He was aware, with a deadly adrenaline-honed clarity, of Karura turning, her mouth open wide in a yell, even as the dark-haired woman struck her a blow from behind: was aware, also, of Syaoran, away on the far bank with his squadron, fighting desperately to guide his screaming horse back into the river, then giving it up as a bad job and leaping from the saddle, sword raised and eyes wide. A third blow struck, and although he met it fearlessly with his sword, the weight of the thing bearing down on him was too much to combat, and the mud beneath his feet left him no place to stand. Still he pushed back, and back, and back, remembering all the while that he could not die here, not now, not in this way: but it was not enough.

Two more of those impossible five-fingered limbs struck out at him, windswift and inexorable, and then he was in its grasp, wrenched up and out of the water at such speed that his head was cracked badly against one of those strange bronze claws. His vision flickered and died, and he had only just enough resolve left to sheathe his sword, clinging to it even now with all the stubbornness of habit, before he felt himself begin to spill away into unconsciousness. He heard Syaoran shouting his name, over and over, sounding very young and frightened: he remembered Fai’s face, his hands, his smile in the cold garden: _I will see you again_ : and then there was nothing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Have two chapters on one day to make up for the missed update last week! Notes on the worldbuilding and influences are [up at my tumblr](http://reshki.tumblr.com/post/76875094624/spare-me-as-im-gone-chapters-3-4) if anyone's interested.


	5. the night comes on

The call, when it came, was not unexpected, and the choice, when he made it, was remarkably simple.

‘The little one won’t give you any trouble, will he?’ Fai asked, as he hooked his hair over his shoulder and tugged it swiftly into a haphazard braid, began to fumble about in a cherry-wood box of oddments for a bit of ribbon: found only a pile of long-expired watch batteries and a lacy bag of marbles he had won at a festival in some world where the grass had been bioluminescent and the bamboo covered in glittering compound eyes. He picked one up and rolled it in his palm: the small illusory fish inside gave a flick of its tail and blew bubbles at him.

‘No child of mine will ever give me trouble if it knows what’s good for it,’ Arashi said, calmly. She tugged a length of dangling cord from the hem of her hakama and aimed it with disconcerting accuracy into Fai’s lap, so that he dropped the marble, fish and all. ‘Hurry up. You have eight minutes exactly.’

‘Yes, ma’am!’ Fai said, and leapt up: a little too fast, it transpired, for he wobbled badly on his feet, and for a moment lost vision. He had not eaten in well over twenty-four hours, and was trying his best to hide it. He gripped at the doorframe and waited to catch his breath.

There came a swift noise of footsteps from the passage, and then a helpful hand had caught at his elbow to steadied him, and a voice was saying, ‘Whoa now, careful there!’

‘Ah! Thank you, Sorata-kun,’ Fai said, leaning a moment against the boy until he was quite certain that he could support himself, then patting his hand fondly. ‘Don’t tell the others, but I’ve always said you were my favourite child,’ he added, in a conspiratorial whisper, and with a heavy wink at Arashi, who ignored him, yawned pointedly, and angled the mirror closer to the candle-light.

‘This is what happens when you skip meals - you _know_ you should at least have eaten breakfast,’ Sorata was saying, settling in for a good scolding: then stopped, peered closer at Fai’s face. ‘Kannushi-sama! You haven’t slept, have you?’

‘Now, Sorata-kun, it’s not polite to make personal remarks,’ Fai reminded him. ‘Are you implying I look tired? Old, perhaps? That’s it, isn’t it? I’m just a decrepit wreck to you, aren’t I? A laughing-stock, a - a source of _ridicule_? Just because of some bags under my eyes? This is why you’re my least favourite child!’

‘No, no, that’s not it at all!’ Sorata protested, immediately contrite. ‘You’re the handsomest man in all Suwa! In all Nihon! In the _world_ , probably! You’ve never had bags under your eyes in your life! _I’m_ the one with bags! I’m just - I’m just jealous of your flawless face and radiant hair! That’s it!’ He paused. ‘It really is radiant, you know. How _do_ you do it?’

‘Butter me up though you may, you unscrupulous fiend, I’ll never share my shiny hair secrets,’ Fai told him, and flicked him on the nose. ‘Begone, flatterer!’

‘Rejected again,’ Sorata sighed, and performed a very dramatic swoon into Arashi’s lap, where he wriggled around happily until he could beam up into her face. ‘Well, hello there, sweetcheeks.’

She pulled a face and shoved him away. ‘Can’t you take him with you?’ she appealed of Fai.

‘No, I think he’s needed here,’ Fai said. ‘You both are. A house needs parents, you know, especially one as full of incorrigible reprobates as this, so it’s up to you two to do a good job of being mommy and daddy while your father and I are away. Can you do that for me?’ Sorata had scrambled to sit upright again, and was nodding eagerly and with a look of tremendous pride, elbowing Arashi happily all the while. Arashi was looking at Fai with a singular disgust, lips curling. _I’m nineteen_ , _not nine_ , she mouthed at him despairingly. He wagged his finger at her. ‘Arashi-chan, I know perfectly well that you think you’re capable of running things all on your own, but you’re not to overwork yourself. Sorata-kun, you do everything she tells you to, and you look after her, alright?’

‘Understood, kannushi-sama!’ Sorata said. ‘Miko-sama, I’m afraid I’m just going to have to spoil you rotten. Them’s the rules!’

Arashi narrowed her eyes dangerously at Fai, then deigned to throw Sorata a scathing glance. ‘You are _so_ lucky you’re pretty,’ she told him.

Sorata positively glowed. ‘She thinks I’m pretty,’ he hissed at Fai, giving him a triumphant thumbs-up. Sorata, as Fai understood, remained unaware that he was half a year from fatherhood; Arashi was perhaps the last person in a fifty kilometre radius who didn’t know that he was still trying to pluck up the courage to ask her to marry him. It was fascinating to watch, not to mention great fun.

A brief fanfare of synthesised trumpets sounded, and, from the very centre of the room, a small holographic view-screen leapt up unprompted, flashing _10_ in subtly lavender roman numerals. Fai had always quite liked the miniature swirling cherry blossoms that accompanied its notifications. In deference to Kurogane, he had managed to talk the President out of personalising their Mirror’s holographic interface with animated gifs of kittens and puppies, but only narrowly.

‘Five minutes to jump,’ Arashi reminded him, quite unnecessarily but with marvellous calm, and slid his pack across the floor. ‘Do you have everything you need?’

‘Yes, yes, of course,’ Fai said, fondly, as Sorata blinked in wonderment when the numerals folded themselves up and collapsed back into the mirror in a stylised swirl of flowers. The Mirror was kept carefully out of sight of most of the household, simply because Fai insisted that half the fun of magic was maintaining its image of mystery, and even Arashi had seen it in action only a scant few times. ‘You’re quite sure you’re going to be alright on your own?’

‘Of course we are,’ Arashi said, getting to her feet and picking up the Mirror, then going to the screen doors and flinging them wide. In rolled a great wave of early mist, and with it the sound of birdsong: three cautious fingers of palest gold crept through the clouds to prod at the edge of the porch. ‘The real question is, as usual, whether or not you will be.’

Still feeling oddly thin, as though he were made of cotton or clear water, Fai followed her. He wore his old travelling clothes, bleached and worn though they were, more for the comfort that they brought him than anything else: they bulked him out, somehow, with their stolid and threadbare familiarity. As he passed from shadow into cool sunlight they shone white, and the wind caught the edge of his cloak, so that he was forced to draw it closer round himself, shivering. They had come from Clow, these clothes, and had passed over the years through most of the known multiverse: but the scrap of red ribbon in his hair had been woven here, in Suwa, in the home that he had chosen.

‘Of course I will be,’ he said, aloud, after becoming aware that several seconds had passed since Arashi had spoken: then replayed what she had actually said, and bolstered his answer with a firm and cheerful, ‘There’s absolutely no cause to go worrying about me, so don’t even think about it! I know things may seem bad, but your father’s gotten out of worse scrapes than this before, usually thanks to me. We’ll sort this out in no time.’

She turned to look at him, the Mirror still pressed flat against her belly, as though she were guarding it. ‘A house needs parents, kannushi-sama,’ she told him. ‘You will bring Kurogane-dono back. Suwa demands it of you.’

Fai raised his eyebrows slightly, but nodded. A heavy weight of magic hung on her words, steely-bright and unbending. It was as close to a formal blessing as he would receive from her, and he felt it settle against his heart as keenly as though it had been the point of a sword. He touched the red thread that bound his hair: remembered unbidden that day in the garden, Kurogane’s mouth pressed warm and adoring against his own, the fallen flower burning bright amid the mist. _He’ll come back_ , Arashi had said then, speech soft with prophecy, and Fai, who as her teacher knew her power well, intended to do his best to trust her.

‘I am loyal to my home,’ he said, and gave her a small smile. She returned it.

‘Bring yourself back, too,’ Sorata advised, leaning against the doorframe, and then swooped in to give Fai a very earnest and only slightly tearful hug. Fai returned it warmly, and pretended not to notice when Sorata started sniffling loudly despite Arashi’s pointed sighing.

He had woken in the blue dawn the day before to the strong distinctive thrum of the Mirror’s magic, which was loud enough to touch him even in dreams. He had known the moment he had seen Syaoran’s face flickering in the viewscreen what had happened. _We assume that they’re going to be used as hostages_ , he had said, and Fai had been completely calm, had accepted it calm and unprotesting, because he should have known better than to hope otherwise: until suddenly he had looked at Syaoran, worlds away though he was, and had seen the same grim resignation in his face, the same stolid unyielding complacency that by utmost necessity must cover despair.

‘Syaoran-kun,’ he had said, reaching out to the viewscreen -

But Syaoran shook his head and gave him a small apologetic smile. ‘I shouldn’t have asked him to come,’ he said, brisk and matter-of-fact, so that Fai could not argue with him. ‘This is my fault, and I don’t expect your forgiveness. The conditions for your jump will be optimal around twenty-two hours from now, at sunrise your time tomorrow: you should arrive here in about two hours. I’ll see you then.’

The viewscreen flickered and died. Fai swallowed, nodded to himself. He sat a moment longer in his tangle of sheets, then stood up, steady and resolute, and went to his kist, began sorting through piles of clothes pilfered from countless worlds until he found the cotton garb of Clow. There were two sets, naturally enough, folded together, the dark inside the light, and two cloaks that wrapped them both round, together with the long heavy glove that Kurogane had sometimes worn as an added protection over the false skin of his right arm. With hands that shook only an infinitesimal amount, Fai separated his own clothes from Kurogane’s, shook them out, held them to the light to inspect them for signs of moths or mildew. The glove he kept aside, almost without meaning to, and could not bring himself to store it away again: like a child taking comfort in a hero’s imagined splendour, he slipped his hand inside, aligned it finger to finger, clenched his fist. It fit closer than he had thought it would. He raised his hand to his lips and kissed the glove in what was less an act of tenderness than a pledge of fealty. He knew his resolve. He was no longer afraid.

Now he watched the dawn rise grey through a rainy wall of mist and counted the shadows of the birds that passed by, waited, patiently and without qualm, for the Mirror to begin its magic. He had the strangest feeling that all of this had happened before.

 

* * *

 

‘It’s still a little strange,’ Fai had said, a lifetime ago, a hundred worlds and more away, in a high white room cut all of quartz from the overhang of a glassy mountain, ‘wanting something, and not feeling guilty for it.’

Kurogane had linked his hands at the small of Fai’s back, and now, leaning in the littlest bit, put his lips to Fai’s shoulder. ‘The hell would you feel guilty about wanting - something?’ he muttered, clearing his throat and looking away, as though pretending that his face had not begun to flush.

It was late afternoon, and just enough sunlight remained to touch the little pale room with a burnished edge of gold. The window, quite safely secured by a forcefield and edged with an elaborate rocaille design, looked down and down past the fifty or so other such rooms carved from the undercut cliff into a vast plain of mist, flooded bright and broken every so often by the vast rose-bearing branches of magnolia trees. It was easily the most luxurious hotel they had ever found themselves in (the pillows were all deliciously fluffy and smelt of rain, and, Kurogane insisted, had a bad habit of wriggling around and attempting to spark miniature thunderstorms while no one was looking), and as a result they had declined to join Syaoran and Mokona in their daring pursuit of lightning-cats. They were by now quite hopelessly tangled up in sheets and in each other, with Kurogane slumped against the wickerwork slope of what was, effectively, a nest of airy blankets, and Fai folded and loose and contemplative into his lap, so warm and so content that he could not help but remember colder times.

‘For a very long time, I thought I was bad luck. I thought that anyone near me, anyone I loved was - well, doomed,’ he explained, lightly, quietly, and kept his face pressed into Kurogane’s chest. He waited for Kurogane to roll his eyes, give a huff of scorn to hide his embarrassment: when there came only silence, he continued, suddenly cross with himself for bringing it up at all, ‘It is a bit melodramatic of me to keep thinking it, I suppose.’

Kurogane shifted under him. A great knocking of knees and heels ensued, and skin caught warm on warm skin. ‘Yeah,’ he said, shortly, as they sorted themselves out again, ‘it is, because you know that it’s bullshit.’ He got his hand into Fai’s hair, moulded his fingers to the curve of his skull, settled one thumb very carefully against the delicate skin of his jaw. There was no heartbeat in that hand, no pull of blood, only the faintest strain and shift of cingulated steel, the smooth shirr of hydraulics. ‘You know you’re not cursed.’

‘Yes, yes, I know,’ Fai said, easily. Kurogane gave a deeply unimpressed grunt, rubbed his thumb along the line of Fai’s throat. Fai brought his arms up to settle them about Kurogane’s neck: and, turning his face against Kurogane’s hair, which prickled at his lips in a fashion so familiar that he could not help but smile, drew in a long and deliberate yawn. He had learned absolution as best he could, gradually and imperfectly, and most days, it was enough. He tallied up the last of his own uncertainty and spent it deftly in confession, throwing in a small self-conscious laugh by way of a gratuity: ‘Still, it’s nice to think that even if I were, it would take a lot more than a curse or two to stop a big bad guard-dog like Kuro-sama.’

And now, at last, Kurogane pulled a face: rolled his eyes, gave a puff of annoyance. Fai suddenly could not bear the weight of his own adoration, which would for a while remain a yearning half-astonished thing, and in a rush of covetousness pulled himself heavier into Kurogane’s arms, sank slow against the warmth of him: closed his eyes and waited, clinging, for him to answer.

‘’Course it would,’ Kurogane muttered, and Fai knew from his voice alone that he was blushing, fumbling his way toward that loud defensive brashness that was the closest he ever came to sincerity. ‘Not gonna be some dumbass curse that kills me. So stop talking crap about guilt.’

Fai gave a soft breath of laughter. Breast to breast and close entangled, they each of them lay a hollow weight against the other, blood-hot and lead-boned: their paired breaths came slow and deep as sleepers’. Still those fingers moved steady through his hair, and that thumb lay cautious against his throat. ‘Such a rude puppy,’ he murmured, because he could not say anything else, because the thing he wanted to say most had no need of being spoken aloud, heavier as it was than all sound and infinitely simple. ‘What if it were a giant wombat curse? You didn’t fare so well against them.’

‘Those bastards were evil,’ Kurogane grumbled. ‘How was I supposed to know they could talk?’

‘It only goes to show that you shouldn’t try to put a saddle on something without asking its permission first. Manners are important, especially when they save you from being thrown into wombat jail.’ Stretching casually, to show that nothing he had said before was particularly important, he found himself pricked by sudden inspiration. ‘Maybe it’ll be a curse that means you have to smile at everyone we meet!’

‘No.’

‘Or a feelings curse! That would be the best thing in the world! You’d have to tell Syaoran-kun how proud he makes you, and cuddle Mokona whenever she asks for cuddles, and you’d have to tell me that I’m a no-good dirty rotten wombat-fondling madman who -’

‘Fuck, shut _up_ ,’ Kurogane snapped, as Fai cackled in triumph, and kissed him.

Those bloodless fingers traced small circles on Fai’s shoulder blade. A miracle thing, he thought: that love and ingenuity could undo empty space, that metal could mimic living flesh, that a ghost with a stolen name could be made a living man. Kurogane bit down hard on his lip, quite without warning, and Fai drew a sharp quick breath, dug his nails into Kurogane’s skin. The next moment, Kurogane had gathered Fai up and tipped him backwards into the pillows, and then Fai was flailing ungraciously underneath him and making an extremely unattractive sort of giggling snort. He groped for a sheet and threw it over Kurogane’s head: Kurogane let out a great squawk of indignation and struggled to come free of it as they sank further into the pillows. Red-faced and gleeful, Fai choked on his own laughter. Kurogane fought his way out and lunged for him, got his arms firmly around Fai’s waist, his glare promising all manner of retribution: then, suddenly, went still, began to blush, buried his face in Fai’s chest.

‘Ah,’ Fai said, rubbing at his eyes, still giggling weakly. ‘Hello? Did I break you? Or did you fall asleep by mistake? I’ve heard puppies do that.’

Kurogane gave a great sigh. Fai peered down the length of his spine, considered the precise shape and shading of his vertebrae in the light of the setting sun. ‘There isn’t any such thing as a curse that could hurt me,’ Kurogane muttered, finally, and pursed his lips just above Fai’s breastbone. ‘Even if - even you were. It wouldn’t matter. So it’s alright. That - that’s all.’

Fai sat up a little way, but still Kurogane clung heavy against him. His shoulders fell and lifted. Fai suddenly felt horribly old and very tired. Quietly, he settled a hand on Kurogane’s head, ruffled his hair fondly, so that Kurogane gave an indeterminate huff and pressed his face closer still, closed his arms so tight around him that Fai feared half to break.

‘If anything bad happens, I’ll stop it first,’ he said, softly. ‘And anyway, if it’s a big scary watch-dog like you and a clever old cat like me, then there’s no way misfortune can hurt us. I knocked out a perfectly nice wombat princess to rescue you, you know! What’s misfortune compared to a wombat princess?’

‘Perfectly nice my ass,’ Kurogane muttered, lips moving slow. Fai smoothed his hair back simply for the feel of it beneath his palm, marvelled at how well he knew something as trivial as the touch of skin. ‘She bit me. Twice.’

‘That’s how giant wombats say hello,’ Fai explained, and got one finger under Kurogane’s chin, tilted it up, thumbed the line of his lips. Kurogane looked up at him with a desolation that struck Fai to the heart, and lifted one corner of his mouth in a wry exhausted smile. In the light, his eyes were a rich gold, clear as amber, very solemn, very young. ‘Don’t look at me like that,’ Fai begged, helpless in a way that horrified him, still somewhat uncertain of exactly what he was supposed to do with a happiness he could hold in his hands without the fear of breaking it. ‘You’re making me want to say things like _I’ll protect you_ or _don’t worry_ , and that’s only going to end up making us both feel foolish.’

Kurogane only watched him, his gaze fixed as a hawk’s, the longing in his face profound. ‘You’ve always been a damn fool anyway,’ he said, finally. ‘I may as well join you in it.’

 

* * *

 

With the rains in Clow ended, the days dawned tremendous and clear. It was barely eight o’ clock when Fai arrived, but already the sun stood bright some way from the horizon, and the last of the dawning wind carried in a wall of warmth from off the erg. Before noon the heat would begin to scorch. The sky, washed bright by the rain and unimaginably blue, showed half a pale daymoon low to the west, and overhead some climbing sandhawk rose in loops to speak a thin spark of sound every other second. Its wings shone white in the morning.

Tall and broad-shouldered, the Pilgrim of the Realms stood alone at the edge of the one of the wide balconies of the Palace of Clown and looked down across the city. Pausing in the shade of the doorway, for the heat outside billowed up from the red clay terrace hard enough to knock the unwary off their feet, Fai watched him a moment, knowing that the conversation to come would be difficult, full of misplaced blame and guilt. Even from this distance, he could see Syaoran’s day-old stubble, the lines about his eyes, the tremor in his hands.

On seeing Fai, his face crumpled, and flinching he drew breath to speak, could only make a strange helpless gesture like a shrug. Fai wasted no more time, but strode to him through the scorching air, arms outstretched, and folded him in close. Syaoran clung to him heavy as a child, let out a long breath. Fai still had difficulty, sometimes, remembering that the boy he had loved and guarded for so long was a father now and a king, and often had to supress the urge to tease and fuss and dote: but as he put his hands to Syaoran’s face and gave it a gentle shake, smiled at him as best he could, he saw very clearly the age in his eyes. It frightened him, and badly. He would watch this face grow old, he realised: he would watch those eyes dim and fail, and sooner, rather than later, he would see his son dead and burnt.

‘I am sorry,’ Syaoran said to him, and bowed his head, formal and grave.

Fai straightened him up, pressed their foreheads together, gripped his shoulders tight. ‘No,’ he said. ‘If I thought that this were your fault, I would be honest with you, and I would tell you. This is outside of your control. This is nothing that you can change. You cannot apologise.’

But, ‘I should have -’ Syaoran insisted, ‘I should have - I should’ve been quicker to get to him, I should’ve seen - I shouldn’t even have allowed Karura-kun to go in the first place - she’s barely seventeen -’

‘And from what I hear, she’s strong for her age and a very courageous young lady,’ Fai said, firmly, and with a bright little smile. ‘This way, Kuro-sama will have someone to look after him until we get there!’ He had not expected his smile to have much effect, and when Syaoran only bit his lip and looked away, Fai gave his shoulders a little shake, then released them: gave him some space, strode over to the balcony and made a great show of examining the city below. ‘They’ll take care of each other, I’m sure of it. All we have to do is find them. Now, to business: how much longer do you have in Clow?’

Syaoran seemed to collect himself, and, joining Fai at the balcony, said, evenly, ‘Not more than three hours. I’ll be - wherever we’re headed, I’ll -’ He drew in a heavy breath: his lips flinched as he finished, ‘I’ll see if I can call in any old favours.’

‘Kuro-sama came to help you of his own free will,’ Fai said, even though he knew, painfully, how little kindness could help, how every offer of forgiveness only merited harsher self-rebuke. ‘I can think of scores of other people who would do the same. None of this is your fault. It’s never a bad thing to ask your friends for help.’

‘But when it could mean their _life_ -!’ Syaoran cried, losing all his composure again in a moment, and slamming his fist onto the ledge of the balcony. ‘I’m not afraid that they will turn against me, or leave me in need. I know that they will help me no matter the cost. That’s what frightens me the most. I cannot be responsible for anyone else being -’ He broke off, drew a deep breath, pressed his lips together. ‘I’ve already lost one set of parents,’ he said. ‘I can’t lose another.’

Fai flinched. Not trusting himself to speak, he looked instead out and out across the dunes to the Ruins, which shone rosy-red in the morning light. That had been the last place, almost twenty years ago, that he had seen the children he had been employed to betray, the children who, in the end, had saved his life and the lives of everyone they knew. It seemed a very long time ago. Syaoran had never found them again, despite his frantic research, his single-minded wandering, his unflagging devotion. It was very likely that they no longer existed anywhere to be found. Still Fai remembered them. Fai remembered everyone.

‘Sometimes I think being wanted is even more frightening than being unwanted,’ he said, slowly. ‘And I’ve been both, so I know. When you’re unwanted, you know you can’t let anybody down, but when people think you’re worth having around - well, then you can do all sorts of terrible things to them without even meaning to.’ Here he looked at Syaoran, who seemed a little calmer, although his eyes were tellingly bright. ‘I want you to think of how you feel about your friends. You’d do anything for them, wouldn’t you? And you wouldn’t mind the inconveniences, because you love them. That’s how all of us feel about you, Syaoran-kun, and about the whole of Clow Kingdom.’

Syaoran nodded, misery clear in his face. ‘Fai-san -’

But from behind them came a gentle cough, and they turned as one to see Sakura waiting the shadow of the great arched doorway, one cautious hand resting on the wall. ‘Sorry to interrupt, but Yukito-san wants to see us in the council chamber,’ she said, quietly. ‘Fai-san, you too.’

‘Ah,’ Syaoran said, and crossed the wide balcony to join her, his shoulders straightening instantly at the sight of her, his face softening. ‘Thank you. I’ll - I’ll just - I’ll go ahead.’ He stopped beside her to put his hand briefly to her waist, and she touched his face, just once, and gently. Then he ducked away into shadow and was gone.

Seeing nothing else for it, Fai heaved a great sigh and turned to face his queen for the first time in five years.

‘He thinks it’s his fault,’ she said, without preamble, without greeting. The floor of the balcony gleamed bright under the rising sun, and already the heat was beginning to rise off it in great waves, but she stood clear in his sight despite the haze, tall and very still in rose-coloured cotton. The goldwork at her brow flashed like the wings of that calling hawk in the light. She was not the unreal girl he had carried sleeping across universes and battled to save from a still death by snow. He loved her no less. ‘He was there. He blames himself.’

‘I know,’ Fai said, and then, because he knew that she was waiting for him to say it, admitted, ‘Part of me still thinks it’s mine.’ She had clearly prepared a rebuttal to this, for she opened her mouth immediately to protest, her face half-wretched with gentleness, but before she could speak, he went on, ‘It’s natural to blame oneself, I know. But sitting around arguing about whose fault it is isn’t going to fix anything, is it?’

The High Queen blinked: looked at him a long while in that quiet, clear-seeing way of hers. She said, ‘You sound like Kurogane-san when you talk that way.’

Fai’s heart clenched in his chest. Even the thought of it made him square his shoulders, lift his chin, clench his fist firm in that familiar glove. ‘I’m not misfortune,’ he said. She seemed to need to hear it: she had been worrying about how he would take this, he saw, and so he hastened to assure her, ‘I know that now. But if I were - if I truly were - I would fight it. I would love all the same, and I would fight to keep that love.’

‘For his sake?’

‘For his. For yours.’ It was still difficult to say. The time he had spent absolved and unafraid would never equal the time he had spent curled before that dark height. Even the certain knowledge that he had been used would never sit in him so sure as the insistence that he had eaten a world to ruin: guilt had been his only virtue, suicide the only noble service he could provide. He closed his eyes. He had never, not even for the space of a day, forgotten his brother’s face. He said, ‘For my own.’

The wind blew in warm, carrying with it the smell of sand and sweet water, and for a moment her long filmy veils streamed out about her like wings. Moving slow to meet him through the heat-haze, her eyes crinkled up, and, smiling suddenly, she said, ‘It’s good to see you, Fai-san.’

He touched her elbow, got his arm properly around her shoulders, gave her a good long cuddle that made her laugh and lifted at least a little of the misery in his breast. ‘I haven’t visited you properly in _forever_ ,’ he said, and cupped her chin. Close-to, he could see that her face looked terribly thin and drawn, and the welling light of magic that hung like dawn around her was rather thinner than he would have liked. He pressed a fond finger to the tip of her nose all the same, tried not to let his worry show. ‘In the future I won’t rely on the big puppy doing silly things like getting himself kidnapped to have an excuse to come and visit, and that’s a promise. How are the wards holding up?’

But, ‘Yukito-san and I are managing for now, thank you, but we are going to need your help in other ways,’ she said, taking his hands and pressing them between her own. ‘I have to tell you, and I’m sorry, but - I’m afraid there’s been a request for ransom.’

 

* * *

 

‘We suspected that they had enlisted local allies, and this would seem to prove it,’ Syaoran explained in the cool of the council chamber as he flattened a little square of parchment upon the table. ‘It’s very formally written - this is the Old High script we use for official royal proceedings and political transactions, so either they have someone who’s very quick with words, or they’re getting help from a Clow citizen who used to get good marks at dayschool.’

Swallows hissed and swung outside the tall claybrick windows. The remainder of the royal family was gathered here, but it was a frantic and fraying little group. Touya, hollow-eyed and haggard, stood silent and unmoving at the head of the table beside his sister, whose every motion he echoed and moved to defend, as though frantic at the thought of losing another family member. Yukito sat alone in a far corner, hands folded, and said nothing: Nadeshiko sat straight-backed but fragile beside him, and kept one arm gently around his shoulders, both of them seeming pale as ghosts in the dimness. The girl Karura had not been much more than seventeen or eighteen, Fai remembered, after a quick tally of years: had been the Captain and the High Priest’s daughter since she had arrived orphaned and full of rage at the palace some years before. He looked for Yukito’s magic in the dark, found it clouded and uncertain, dim as a bloom of dust against his misery. This could not continue.

He looked away from the grieving family and focused his mind with all its sharpness upon the little scrap of paper. ‘And there can be no doubt that it is legitimate?’ he asked, having only a passing familiarity with the language of Clow, and none at all with its script.

Sakura nodded. ‘A dead thing used a longbow to shoot it at the city walls from outside the shields just before dawn, then - then shut itself down,’ she said. Her throat moved in a quick, convulsive gesture of repulsion, but she gave no other sign of distress. ‘We still don’t know how, but we have its body, and it is wholly dead.’

‘You can’t know that,’ Nadeshiko reminded her daughter, authoritative and calm. ‘Keep it chained, keep it guarded. I’ll have it examined later.’

‘Kurogane-san was right,’ Syaoran remarked. He seemed not to have heard either of them: he was tapping at the table-top with his fingers, glancing every so often at the window, watching Sakura in something like anguish when he thought that she wasn’t looking. Mokona had curled up on his shoulder and was cuddled close against his neck, nuzzling at him as a cat might nudge a sick kitten, but it was not much help. The jump must come soon, and then his family would be abandoned. ‘He anticipated a ransom demand, or at least an attempt to open talks. He said that -’

‘That the attacks were simply a means of getting your attention,’ Fai said, loudly. Touya flinched: Syaoran turned away. In the corner, Yukito gave a little unhappy sigh and put his head onto his mother-in-law’s shoulder. Only Sakura met Fai’s gaze.

‘Do you agree?’ she asked him.

Fai drew in a deep breath, spinning out every option, seeing each outcome laid out before him in a frantic whorl of possibility. Kurogane must have stood in this room, he realised, suddenly: have stood here at the head of the table, just where he was standing now, had this same conversation, worked through the same puzzle with his stubborn steady acuity, come to the same conclusions. The notion lent clarity to his thoughts and strength to his resolve. Fai could not be less than Kurogane, could not fail him, not now. He looked around at the small and wretched remains of his family and knew what he must do.

‘I think that’s correct, but at the same time, we can’t ignore the fact that they took livestock,’ he said, clear and sharp, unshaking. ‘They took goats, they took poultry, they took food? For the most part they simply targeted small villages to stock up on supplies before hitting a few larger targets to make their intent known. They are desperate: they have their shock troops, certainly, but I think that they have little beyond that.’ He sorted through the information that Syaoran had given him, filtering it quick and fast. ‘They made no contact until they took hostages, but they never bothered to take hostages before, which suggests that they were afraid, and needed to be very confident that they had strong leverage before dealing with us. The girl, Karura - she’s well-known as a member of the royal house, I take it?’

Yukito stirred. ‘She has served in a few garrisons to the north, and she accompanied Touya on patrol last year when there were bandit attacks in the north-east,’ he said. ‘She’s known. Certainly if their insider knows enough to write a serviceable document in Old High, they’ll be politically conscious enough to know the faces of the royal house.’

Fai nodded, spinning quickly from one conclusion to the next, watching the pattern take shape before his eyes. He was not like Kurogane: did not have that slow and determined way of thinking that could bore through a stonewalled defence given time and pick without error the strongest strategy for any situation: but he could spin a problem out on the air, could pull it apart like a spiral of snowflakes and crystallise upon the answer in seconds. It would have to be enough. ‘They are a small force, then, and they are desperate. They had no hopes that you would deal with them fairly, which was why they made no attempt to treat with you from the start,’ he said. ‘They are used to war, to cruel business. They expect viciousness because they are vicious themselves. Those - those soldiers of theirs, those deadworks? They will be weapons, developed for a war unlike anything Clow country has known in centuries. You cannot face them head-on, not when the Queen and the High Priest are engaged here.’ He looked to Syaoran. ‘You were right to call me. I am needed.’

Syaoran’s face flickered: but before he could say anything, the little bundle at his shoulder stirred and unfolded itself. ‘Mokona wants to say something,’ she said, softly, and, leaping from his shoulder, crept across the table to Fai’s hand. ‘Is it OK if Mokona talks?’

‘Of course,’ Fai said, softly, and rubbed his knuckles against her ears as she nuzzled at him, small and fretful. ‘Mokona’s help would be very valuable. What is it?’

‘It’s not proper magic he’s using,’ she explained, getting her paws around Fai’s wrist and clambering up onto his arm. ‘Mokona knew it wasn’t right, because it made a funny sound. It made a _bunnnnn_ , _bunnnnnnnn_ sound.’ She blew a small raspberry against Fai’s shoulder to demonstrate. ‘Mokona didn’t understand, but then we saw it making the portals in the sky over the river. They were too little, and they sounded weird. They’re like the mirrors. They’re not proper portals, not _proper_ magic.’

Someone cleared their throat, and then Yukito spoke again. ‘Going by what I’ve been told, the technology in Piffle World works by emulating the magic that the President observed the rest of you using,’ he said, slowly, as though he wanted Fai to understand something. ‘The mirrors are just artificial generators of the kind of magic that you and Mokona both use to cross worlds, Fai-san. Clearly, in worlds that are sufficiently advanced, that kind of thing is possible. The reason we were struggled get a fix on these jumps at first - the reason that their magic feels so odd to me, and is so difficult to ward against? I think it’s magic that’s been artificially generated by machines. Going by what Mokona observed in the battle, it may even be a form of - well, to me it seems like -’

Fai saw it. ‘Technopathy,’ he said: watched for Yukito’s tired nod. ‘They’re not from this world at all.’

‘We’d guessed that, although we didn’t have proof,’ Nadeshiko put in. ‘Still, that begs the question - what were they doing here in the first place, and, if they have the ability to create portals, why don’t they simply leave?’

‘Time enough to learn that later,’ Fai said, shaking his head, and clenched his fist inside the glove. He could feel the wards straining overhead like a pair of vast silver wings: could pick out the many places where they had grown thin and threadbare and been fletched new with rosy feathers. Even Nadeshiko had contributed her own magic, subtly disguised but noticeable all the same by its sun-white strength and shell-like sheen. In several places they had cracked, as though - to continue a metaphor that served ill to express the mechanisms of magic - struck sharply, again and again, by a copper blade that had left behind a bruise and a strange greenish sheen of electricity. They were strong, but they would not hold forever. Fai shook the magic from his sight and said, ‘For now, we act.’

‘I won’t be here to help you, Fai-san,’ Syaoran warned him. ‘What do you intend to do?’

‘It’s very simple,’ Fai said, brisk and blithe. There was a danger rising in him that he had not known in years, the same danger that had destroyed a stadium and pulled a palace down into dust, folded a world in on itself. ‘You’re going to get your daughter back, Yukito-san. I’m going to get my husband back. And if anything bad has happened to either of them, I’m going to kill the people responsible.’ Here there came a touch to his shoulder, and here turned, in surprise, to see Touya standing at his side. ‘Please don’t get in my way, Captain,’ he added, politely, and gave him a thin, brittle smile.

But Touya met that smile with a grim twist of the mouth. ‘Actually,’ he said, speaking for the first time, ‘I think I might have a plan.’


	6. the louder grew the wind

The document of negotiation pinned to the walls of the capital had specified a particular ridge with a rocky spine where black-boned thorn-bushes grew, a good half-day’s ride from any inhabited areas, and had in its demands for negotiation factored in precisely enough time to allow a small party of horsemen to make the journey from Clow proper. Silvertrees grew thick all about, and beyond the screen of leaves, just visible at the foot of the ridge, lay a dark broad reservoir, flat and unmoving under the dry dusty heat. No birds sang.

Sitting alone on a rock in a clearing, whittling away at a bit of sun-whitened wood with a clip-point knife, was a man. His sunburnt face was lean and pleasant, his cropped hair very pale, his unfamiliar clothes plain and travel-worn. A scuffed satchel lay at his feet, stuffed clumsily to the brim with maps and what looked like camping gear. On his nose was perched a jaunty pair of round-rimmed spectacles. He could have been any ordinary traveller, taking a well-earned rest from the road: but his fingernails were crusted black, and the little knife with which he whittled was red with blood.

He looked up as three men approached on foot, and offered them a winning smile. ‘Ah, hello!’ he said, in a light and pleasant voice made slightly tinny by the pink and aggressively heart-shaped Piffle Princess translator concealed in Fai’s pocket. ‘I’ve been expecting you! Won’t you come into the clearing where I can see you? I’m on my own, don’t worry.’

‘I am Touya of the Royal Family of Clow, Captain of the Palace Guard and brother to the High Queen,’ Touya called, and held up his sword: planted it, firmly, point-down in the sand and strode past it, as was the custom when making peace-talks in Clow. ‘With me is the High Priest of Clow, and our friend and ally Flowright of Suwa. We are here to open negotiations with the enemy who has been terrorising our kingdom. I take it you will speak for them?’ Beaming from ear to ear, the man gave a nod, and so Touya continued. ‘We are all of us armed, and not a hundred yards behind us is a full complement of guardsmen. We do not want conflict, but we will defend ourselves if we must. You would be advised not to offer us violence.’

The man looked them over once, seeming unimpressed. ‘Wouldn’t dream of it,’ he said. ‘Such names you have! You’ve left me feeling inferior. For the record, I’m Bols - just Bols, and I’m the leader of my division.’ With a flick of his knife, he worked at a last flake of wood: it peeled away wetly and fell pink to the sand. ‘So, you’ve come about your daughter, Captain? And, I suppose, about my fine friend with the arm.’

Fai flinched. He could not help it. It was the barest gesture, but it was enough. Behind those demure little wire-rimmed spectacles, the man’s eyes flickered, lighted on Fai’s. ‘Ah,’ he said. It could have been a trick of the light, for the heat-haze all about was half-blinding, but his pupils seemed almost to dilate, like a cat sighting its quarry. ‘Catch!’ he called, and, with a flick of his wrist sent his work spinning through the air, straight towards Touya’s breast.

Fai shot out an arm and caught it easily. It was a small and horrible wooden hand. The edges were flecked with blood.

Touya swallowed.

‘You’re very skilled,’ Fai said, brightly, turning the little thing over in his own hands with great delicacy. He felt rather as though he were touching a murder weapon, or some wretched curse-doll, a filthy thing he longed throw aside and burn. He noticed, belatedly, that the ground beneath his feet was beginning to shake. ‘Is it a present for someone?’

‘Easy now,’ Touya was murmuring, to him, one hand on his shoulder, ‘easy, it’s a trap, he’s baiting us, he -’

But Bols laughed. ‘No, just - a memento of an old friend,’ he said, in answer to Fai’s question. ‘You can keep it, though, if you like. Something to remember me by, how’s that?’

Small stones trembled and slid. The air was still as death, but already the leaves of the silvertrees were starting to bristle, and the thorn-bushes were chattering like teeth. Fai held blood in his hands and smiled. He said, ‘How kind.’

‘Now that we’ve broken the ice,’ Bols continued, grinning, ‘I don’t suppose you’d care to tell me a bit more about yourself? Flowright, wasn’t it? I think I might have a surprise for you!’

The sun beat down hot on Fai’s back. ‘If you must know, my name is Fai D Flowright, the Mage of Suwa,’ he said, heart swelling beyond mastery as he spoke that name, power building, ‘and I don’t bargain with murderers.’

‘A noble principle, I’ll give you that,’ Bols said, nodding thoughtfully, as though Fai had made a very good point, ‘but one that isn’t too wise, I’m afraid.’

‘Then you may speak with me,’ Touya said, ostentatiously elbowing Fai out of the way, as they had agreed he would have to do at some point, if only for dramatic effect. ‘We are here to negotiate the release of your prisoners, and nothing more. What are your terms?’

‘Oh, now, how brusque!’ Bols complained. ‘Flowright here and I were just getting to know each other. Don’t you want to see my surprise? It’s quite interesting, you know, or at least I thought it was. Tohru!’

From the line of silvertrees there came a rustling of branches and a faint thud. Touya flinched: shifted infinitesimally, eyes narrowed and shoulders squared, so as to put Yukito behind himself. Fai, for his part, lifted a hand, readied a shieldcasting. Bols laughed, showing a set of blindingly white teeth, and waved a calming hand at them. A woman appeared from the trees, a long heavy pack slung over her shoulder: handed it to him with bad grace, stood by biting her lip. Fai did not let up his stance. Touya never once relaxed. The woman stared them both down, chin lifted, black hair blazing in the sunlight. Fai saw, very clearly, how she knotted her fingers into the edge of her cloak to keep them from shaking.

‘No need to be so jumpy,’ Bols was saying, with that same gentle, knowing smile. ‘I only wanted to show you my surprise.’

With great care, he began unwrapping the pack. Something about his neat and fastidious ways seemed incredibly filthy: the awful contrast of that sweet little smile and those black-caked fingernails made Fai shudder. He pulled back a flap of reddish fabric in just the way that he had peeled back that last wet curl of wood, just the way a huntsman might skin a deer: for that was not dye staining the cloth: that was blood -

‘Fascinating piece of machinery,’ he said, and hoisted the arm on high. The fingers lolled limp in the sunlight. ‘I’ve seen something rather like it before, but that was a very long way away from here. I don’t think that our mutual friend was from my hometown, not at all, but, equally, I’ve seen nothing like it here, so where _could_ he have been from? What a wonderful riddle!’ He ran those black-tipped fingers in a gentle caress along the palm, then down the length of the wrist. Wires hung loose from the shoulder, which was crusted, thickly and vividly, with blood. ‘I don’t suppose you’d know where it’s from, Mr Flowright? Its owner was rather reluctant to share anything with my team, even after we questioned him extensively.’

This had not been part of the plan.

‘Yes, he is rather a reluctant man, isn’t he?’ Fai agreed, holding fast to the little wooden hand. His mouth had gone dry. He did not breathe. He did not think. He did the only thing he knew how to do. He smiled.

‘ _Very_ extensively,’ Bols insisted, thumbing the point of his knife, matching Fai smile for smile. ‘Anyway, since you seem to be a well-travelled fellow yourself, I’d appreciate it awfully if you could perhaps see your way towards helping me and mine make our own way out of here? We’ve been stranded for quite some time, and a little assistance in finding our way home would be greatly appreciated. In fact, if you see fit to help us out, I’d be so grateful I might even let you have the rest of the body back for burial.’

A stone cracked beneath Fai’s foot.

Having dealt thoroughly with Fai, Bols settled the arm down in the dust as though it were of no account, and turned his attentions instead to Touya. ‘You’ll be interested to learn that the girl, at least, is still alive,’ he said, quite as though he were a salesman offering his customer a good bargain. ‘How old is she? Seventeen? Eighteen? I am glad she isn’t younger. I did feel a little bad about torturing an old man to death, true, but killing children is _such_ a nuisance.’

Touya’s jaw moved, and even the woman’s face twitched visibly, but Fai paid them no mind. Every edge had been clarified, every shadow cut sharper into the dust. The leaves of the silvertrees shone like blades. He became aware that his chest was heaving. Still he held to that small bloody hand. They had a plan. He could not deviate from it. He must hold his control. The arm lay limp in the sand: already two flies had lighted upon it. He had paid for its prototype with the very magic that had necessitated it. He had lain beneath it on cold windblown mornings and kissed it under rain. Curled limp in the dust, it looked somehow undignified, unimportant, very small.

‘Tell me,’ Touya was saying, in a very clear and dangerous voice, ‘if all you want from us is a little magical assistance, why did you feel the need to raid towns and murder innocents, to kill one hostage and terrorise another? What is this world of yours, and what do you intend to do when you return there?’

Bols tutted. ‘Ah! Careful! Classified information, that is.’

There had been a plan, but there had always been a plan, written and begun long before his birth. The choice that cowering child had made in that pit had been its last. All his life beyond that point had been design, and he an unthinking device in the hands of its author. There had always been a plan, and he had not deviated from it until he had met two small unreal children who laughed when he told bad jokes, met a man who had looked at him without pity. He had put his sword through his daughter’s chest and broken a building open to the air in his terror and remorse. He had collapsed in the mud of a strange far country and tried to piece a dying man back together with his hands. There had always been a plan. There had always been a curse. Twenty years of respite was nothing. Two hundred years would not have outnumbered the time he had spent in that pit. This was ineluctable. This was his fault.

‘Really, though, all we wanted to do was talk!’ Bols was insisting, those white teeth glinting, those neat black nails tapping at his knee. ‘We didn’t like to disturb you, not with those very impressive wards up - and of course, we had to eat! We’re truly sorry to have caused so much trouble to you. Don’t you want us to stop bothering you, hmm?’

_Killing children is such a nuisance._ Fai remembered the girl, Karura, half-glimpsed in a mirror years ago as she swung a short practice-sword at a potted plant, her face alight with mischief. He remembered holding Sakura’s hand while she sobbed in a strange cold room. He remembered the dark height and the stinking pit, pale hair floating in blood, bone gleaming in the twilight. _Killing children is such a nuisance_.

‘I think you can see why I don’t want to return what could be a wing of scouts to an enemy who might invade us at any moment,’ Touya said. ‘The walls between the worlds have grown thin, these last years, as more travellers come and go, but there’s been no outbreak of inter-dimensional warfare just yet. I’d hate for Clow to suffer the first. I ask you again: where are you from, and what do you want?’

Fai heard the words but thought nothing of them. There had been a plan, but he could not remember it anymore. Stones were rattling underfoot. The air had begun to crackle. There had been a plan. He must remember it. He could not show too much of his strength, not yet, must convince them that he was compromised, no longer a threat. He was always a threat. He would always bring calamity. Around him, the wind was beginning to rise.

Bols wagged a finger. ‘Ah, now, I’m afraid that you’re in no position to be asking tricky questions like that!’ he sang. ‘You’ve already lost one friend. Wouldn’t you just hate it if I had the girl’s hand with me, too? As it happens, I don’t, but keep asking questions and she might end up like Mr Flowright’s, ah, friend.’ He winked at Fai. ‘We would hate that, wouldn’t we?’

Fai looked up. At his side, Touya was shaking. There had always been a plan, but this time, it belonged to him, and this time, he was in control.

‘I’m afraid I didn’t make myself clear enough earlier, when I said that I wasn’t looking to bargain with you,’ he said, kindly, and when he took a step forward, the ground shook beneath his feet. The little wooden hand in his palm blazed briefly with a coldfire curse of Old Valeria and was vaporised. ‘Silly of me, I know, so let me put it another way.’

The ridge exploded.

Yukito had a shield up around Touya in the space of a heartbeat, and they cowered together in the lee of Fai’s devastation as rock broke open and sand streamed away. Several of the thornbushes were instantly uprooted, and the silvertrees were blown back with a furious noise of tearing wood as a long rope of magic crackled out, lurid runes writing themselves half-formed and meaningless on the air, and ate away everything in its path. The woman leapt away, cursing, and was sent skidding by the aftershock into a tangle of thorns, but Bols simply took a step to one side. Fai struck out at him again and again. His blows were powerful but badly-aimed, just he intended them to be. He must seem desperate and helpless. He must seem as though there were nothing else he could do.

The woman had clambered to her feet, and was staggering back to Bols, clutching at her side. ‘Get us out!’ she screamed. ‘Get us out, you _idiot_!’

Bols, unconcerned as the world broke apart beneath his feet, struck her hard across the face. ‘You act when you are ordered to,’ he told her, quite calmly.

‘Oh, _fuck_ you -’ she began, but then Fai lost sight of her as a particularly large explosion kicked up a cloud of dust.

He broadened his focus, sending shockwave after shockwave ruckling through the dry fissile rock, scattering sand sky-high. He kept his mind clear. He kept his mind calm. He did not dare draw on his horror even to lend authenticity to his pretended breakdown: if he thought, even for a moment, of that arm, lying like offal in the dust, he would destroy the ridge where they stood and everyone on it. Instead he struck out again and again, seemingly at random, but with each blow calculated to do just the right amount of damage, to make himself seem wild with grief and uncontrollable. He was a soldier. He could control himself.

There came a strange light from within the murk, and suddenly Bols came charging down to meet him. In his hands were two strange crackling swords, their ornate copper hilts laden with chains, their blades like twin beams of light that spat out sparks and rippled the air around them. Fai had seen weapons like that only once. He lashed out at them immediately, well aware of the damage they could do, and was pleased, in a distant sort of way, to see Bols stumble as evaded the rope of runes, go tumbling down the steepening hillside and crash into a breaking spur of rock. The clouds of dust closed over him again, but Fai was not yet done. There was a plan.

Something touched his arm, and he turned, a cold-burning spark hovering at his fingertips, to see clinging to his arm the woman. Her lip was still bleeding from the blow that Bols had dealt her, and her eyelashes were caked with sand. ‘He’s alive,’ she croaked out, fingers biting at Fai’s wrist. ‘Alright? The guy with the arm, the girl, both of them. They’re still alive. If you let me get out of here I can keep them safe. I can keep them from getting hurt. Just let us go!’

Fai stared. Compassion struck at him, suddenly, for she was young, far younger than he had thought at first, and very frightened. Still he could not show her mercy, at least not immediately. So, ‘You’re a traitor to your country,’ Fai spat, still playing his part for all he was worth, still forcing himself into the role of an unstable mourner pushed to his utmost limit. They could not know that he was more than this: they could not know that he was not yet broken. ‘Why would I trust you? Why wouldn’t I let you die?’

The woman’s eyes darkened. ‘You think I don’t want to?’ she shouted, over the building roar of Fai’s magic. ‘You think I wouldn’t give anything to - ?’ But here she broke off, and shook her head angrily. ‘You listen to me, whoever you are, you _listen_! I am doing this for a reason! I made a mistake, alright, I screwed up, and now I have to fix it, and I don’t care how. Doesn’t matter how much I want to die, not while she’s still dead, you hear me? So you stop this! Stop it now!’

Fai stared at her. Her eyes widened, as though she had only just heard her own words, for in her pain and her rage she had spoken a great secret to a stranger: but perhaps here, too, some pattern of fate was at work. Speechless, he let his magic die in his hand. She stared back, black eyes flashing like coals. Something sparked in her arm, and Fai noticed a copper band there, edged in chrome, equipped with strange panels of green glass. It contained no magic, although something about it hummed strangely: it was like a patch of static electricity, hair-rising and unpleasant: a cog clicked into place -

Through the silence, there came a strange, thick, ringing sound. Bols heaved himself up off the ground, tapping at a similar band on his wrist. ‘I think that concludes the negotiations for today, don’t you?’ he asked: pulled off his glasses to wipe them clean of the blood that had spilt from his split brow, settled them neatly on his nose. ‘We’ll be in touch once you’ve calmed down a bit. Nice meeting you!’

The woman flickered. The band hummed and unfolded, generating three flickering points of light in a small triangle around her. Slowly, she began to web apart into strange coiling strands. Fai flinched back, eyes watering at the touch of unfamiliar power. It was almost like his own magic, but false, somehow, and painful as a livewire: no birds had sung in all that still place, no fly moved or desert cat stirred, and now he knew why: they feared the touch of it, even as he did. A portal opened in the ground beneath her, and she collapsed in a writhing mass of coils and was gone. Fai turned, breathing hard. Bols, already dissolving, caught his eye and held it, smiling: then was gone.

Yukito let up his shield: Touya helped him to his feet. A single bird sang suddenly in the stillness, and then a chorus broke out, as though even the birds were relieved.

Yukito said, ‘I think that went well.’

* * *

In that grey rainy city where soldiers in strange armour stood on almost every street corner, and where lighted billboards sparked and flickered and dyed the smoke a hundred changing colours, Syaoran fell back against the wall of the alley, chest heaving, and closed his eyes. Fai knelt beside him, anxious, and used a pocket-knife to cut away the singed sleeve. Beneath, the burn showed sharp on the boy’s arm, an angry red patch of skin surrounded by blisters. Fai hissed in sympathy and felt for his water canteen: pressed the cold curve of the aluminium canister gently against the burn to cool it as best he could.

‘We’ll need to get that looked at properly,’ he said, worriedly, and tried to smile as Mokona leapt from his shoulder to cuddle into Syaoran’s lap. ‘Those light-up swords are quite something, aren’t they? Like something out of one of those movies Kuro-sama liked so much.’ And then, as Syaoran gave a little half-laugh, ‘How is it?’

Face streaked with rain and soot, Syaoran gritted his teeth. ‘It’s not so bad for now,’ he tried, bravely: then, seeing Fai’s stern face, gave a small sound of pain, and admitted, ‘It’s not - it’s not good.’

‘I don’t suppose we could find a doctor anywhere around here, could we?’ Fai mused, and looked over his shoulder.

The concrete walls were plastered with old peeling flyers that appeared, on closer inspection, to be thin LCD sheets, rainbowed in places with distortion and decay, each one looping a little advertisement. The worst of the rain had been filtered out by the stories balconies and wiring strung overhead, but the roar of hung loud as static all around. From somewhere far away, some open window or creaking doorway that spilled light onto the smog, a song wound silver as cigarette smoke onto the evening air. Fai had heard it before, somewhere, he thought, in some world: he knew the shape of it, but could not remember the words. The air stank of mildew and of ash. There was no comfort here.

Kurogane stood in the mouth of the alleyway, silhouetted dark against the sodium glare. ‘Don’t know if anyone’d be willing to help us,’ he said, in answer to Fai’s half-asked question. ‘You saw how quickly the crowd cleared after the soldiers went for us. They’re scared of them. Strangers aren’t welcome here.’

Fai remembered those impersonal glass visors, the gold epaulettes, the strange mechanical weapons. ‘Then what can we do?’

Kurogane turned. Bleeding from the lip, he said, ‘We’re getting out of here.’

* * *

They had brought with them only a small contingent of soldiers, pulled chiefly from the reserve ranks Royal Guard itself the better to ensure skill and discretion, and had made camp in the lee of the ridge, where the trees afforded them some protection from the worst of the wind and the glare, and that flat dark pool, little more than an ankle’s depth of mud, afforded them water and rest. The heat lay heavy as stones on their shoulders, but toward evening, the worst of it spilled away with the setting sun, and darkness brought with it something of a respite. A little way away from the few scattered fires, Fai sat alone and attended to the arm.

Handling it impersonally and without sentiment, he spent well over an hour cleaning it and restoring it to working condition, easing each grain of sand out from the gears, stripping the ends of the connective wires with his teeth and flattening them neatly to keep them from fraying, smoothing down the ragged patches where the simskin had been torn away to reveal the steel coils beneath, all with the grim distant focus of a man building a gun. He had learned its upkeep over long years and understood its mechanisms like language. He remembered drowsing indoors away from the blind heat of summer while the doves churred outside in the afternoon: remembered Kurogane, a hot heavy weight around him, even that coldblooded arm flushed to skin-heat by the warmth of the day. _Stop fidgeting_ , he’d complain, as they dozed under folds of crisp cotton, and _your hair keeps getting in my mouth_ and _your elbows are too pointy and why do I even keep you around_? and a hundred other slow grumbles. Fai had fitted his head to Kurogane’s hand, his hip to his wrist, back to belly, knee to knee, and, fixed firm at all points and unfailingly contained, had sprawled there effortless and unbuilt as he was nowhere else in a thousand worlds. Now he scraped the blood out from beneath the arm’s fingernails, folded it into a length of clean linen and bound it up with waxed canvas. It was not his to cling to like a crutch, or weep over in the dark. It had always been a private thing, that sacrifice, and now it was his to defend.

It was not yet late, but the heat of the day had left the little lect of soldiers exhausted, and few of them remained awake by the time Fai made his way back to the closest campfire. It had been lit more to assist with the cooking than to bring warmth, for the nights were not yet too chilly, and was a narrow-boned thing, built from knots of thorn that had long since collapsed into embers. The High Priest sat nearby on a rock, a clothbound book upon his knee, and in one hand a very complicated-looking set of silver compasses that fairly sung with magical energy that he used to tap out some calculations upon the page: but he chewed absently as he worked on the end of a plastic ball-point pen, and, perched on top of his hand-stitched leather satchel, the little pink translation matrix, which was also outfitted with various forms of recording and playback equipment. Touya, for his part, was slumped on the ground beside his husband and had fallen into a drowse, head in Yukito’s lap, one arm hanging limp across his knees. Fai stared at the curl of his fingers, gold in the firelight, heavy with bone and full of blood. _The walls between the worlds have grown thin_.

‘I’m optimistic,’ Yukito was saying, quietly: plucked the pen from his mouth, tapped it against his knee. ‘We got a great deal more information out of him than I thought we would, and hopefully he thinks that he has the measure of us now. You gave him a good show, and we were able to record the progress of the jump. I think it worked. If I can just get these calculations right, then we’ll have his location soon, or close to it.’ When Fai said nothing, he continued, ‘The girl said that they were both alive, Fai-san.’

His hair in the moonlight looked white as snow, and the lines of age in his thin brittle face were all the more apparent. Fai blinked at him a moment. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I just don’t see any reason to trust her.’ Settling himself down at the fire edge of the firelit circle, he added, ‘Forgive me. I am tired and I am afraid: but you are even more tired than I am, I think.’

Yukito shrugged, tapped at his knee with his pen. ‘I don’t like to leave the wards to Sakura and Nadeshiko,’ he said, softly, ‘but I -’

‘If you had held them very much longer, you would have died,’ Fai pointed out, as gently as he could. ‘The Captain didn’t know that, did he?’ Yukito’s face faltered, and he looked down at Touya, who was snoring away unconcerned. ‘Karura-chan needs both her parents to come back to. I’m astonished by how strong you are, but you should take care of yourself, too!’

Yukito was well-used to Fai’s ways, and so he said only, ‘Thank you,’ and then, softly, ‘The same goes for you, you know.’

‘I know,’ Fai said, because he did. He did not believe in curses, not anymore.

He slept badly and dreamed of snow: but when he touched it, it was dust. Long before the stars had faded, he was awake and counting his own breaths. He had spent so long breathing in a constant counterpoint that he was astonished he remembered the way of it on his own. Still he must not falter. His life had not been saved so that he could use another’s as a crutch for his survival. _They’re still alive_. She had been so afraid. _If you let me get out of here I can keep them safe._ Liars were always afraid. Her guarantee meant nothing. Still he must not falter. Many of the stars overhead were familiar, although some of the constellations were skewed, or else missing entirely. He named as many as he could in all the languages he knew, beginning with Old Valerian, moving through the archaic formal speech still used in Ruval and the three chief dialects of the snowy lowlands, ending in the speech of Suwa. He clenched his fist inside that glove. He knew, now, how to be strong. He knew he would not falter.

As morning broke, already stiflingly hot, he watched the little camp begin to stir. He accepted a skin of muddy water boiled tasteless by some cleansing charm and a knot of olive-studded bread, which he chewed and swallowed mechanically. Then he settled in, as he had many times before, to outwit the wait. The process of magical computation was one that Yukito seemed to enjoy, even if it did bore every other right-thinking magician senseless. Left alone as Yukito retreated from the worst of the sun into the shelter of a little canvas tent, where he could sort through his data in peace, Fai wandered over to the shadow-side of the ridge, where the silvertrees knotted their feet into red rubble and grey-toothed echeveria sent up long delicate spires of gold and rose. He found a good round sitting-stone, speckled and cracked with little patterns like faces, of just the sort he might once have told a sleepy princess had been a troll caught in the sunlight and turned to rock: and here he waited alone with his thoughts and watched the sunlight move through the shadows of the leaves.

He did not believe in curses, but the death of a human man was not a curse, only inevitability. He had always known that he would outlive Kurogane. He had not expected it to come so soon.

‘Shouldn’t you be off in the numbers tent, helping out with - numbers?’ a voiced asked, and Fai glanced up to see that the Captain had installed himself against a tree, and was squinting at him through the dimness, his mouth a grumpy slash in his old weathered face. Fai was four times his age and more, but those years would never show in him. He felt quite keenly in that moment like a stone or a star, some unblinking thing that watched as all else withered. As though succumbing after years to a bad habit, he rearranged his face into an apologetic smile, cocked his head cheekily: but Touya did not smile back. ‘Thought you were good with all that magic stuff.’

‘Yukito-san is getting there well enough on his own,’ Fai said, waving a lazy hand, and leaned back against the stone. ‘There’s so much arithmetic involved in magical transport, you know, even on small intra-dimensional jumps. Telepatetic geometry! Perimanthic trigonometry! I learnt it all ages ago, but it’s such a bother.’

Touya gave a huff: settled himself in against the tree, glared up into its branches. ‘What are you really doing?’

Fai’s smile stiffened. After a moment, he sat up: pulled a bit of a face, let out a breath. ‘Thinking,’ he said.

‘About?’

_Not while she’s still dead,_ the woman had said, her black eyes flashing. _I have to fix it_. He remembered what he had been told of the deadworks, shambling half-rotted things, corpses brought back wrong. He knew the laws of time and space. The man Bols had found a way to bend them, perhaps, as people had before and likely would again: but there was no true resurrection, not for mortal souls, not this way. He thought of her hard dark helpless face, twisted with pain and full of guilt, and felt sick. She had seemed so young. Everyone did, these days.

‘You know where they’re from, don’t you?’ Touya prompted him, still frowning up into the grey thorn tree.

‘I think so,’ Fai said, cautiously, leaning forward and looking up at him with as much honesty as he could muster. ‘At least, I recognise the weaponry, and the technology. They’re very strong, and they’ve been through a bad war. If they’ve found a way to start crossing worlds, even experimentally, if they’re using dead men as soldiers -’ He paused, unsure of what else to say.

But Touya made a noise of assent, knocked his head back against the bark. ‘This isn’t the start of an invasion, is it?’ he asked, casually. ‘That man, Bols - there won’t be more like him, will there?’

Fai looked down at his hand: picked at a little thread in the pale glove. He said, ‘Not if I can help it,’ and smiled again.

Leaflight moved slow across Touya’s tough old face. His expression was unreadable. He said, ‘I trusted you to control yourself back there, and you did. I need to know that you can keep doing that. My daughter’s life depends on it. If this plan of yours doesn’t work, then -’

But the next moment, there came a babble of voices, and then a single loud shout. Fai was on his feet in an instant, magic crackling at his fingertips, and Touya had leapt forward, hand on his hilt. Through the haze, they could see Yukito peering out from the folds of his tent, blinking in the sun like any other mild-mannered middle-aged man, a pencil tucked behind his ear. His head went up in response to some shout, too faint for them to understand, and instantly he dropped his armful of maps and strode away out of sight.

At Fai’s side, Touya muttered, ‘Yuki?’ and started to run.

The hot heavy air dragged at Fai’s lungs, and even half a minute under full sun was enough to set his head pounding, but he kept pace with Touya as best he could. As they drew near to the edge of the camp, he caught sight of a girl, very young and very tall, making her way through the little knot of soldiers. Her hair and cloudy clothes were caked red with mud and dust, and her face was very badly sunburnt: she looked haggard and drawn, and was likely suffering from heatstroke. She pushed on regardless, bravely fending off any offers of assistance: waved to Yukito as he came sprinting down to meet her.

‘Hi,’ she said, sheepishly, and collapsed.

Shaking visibly, Yukito lowered her to the ground and held her close. ‘Where is she? _Where is she_?’ Touya was yelling, his rough voice breaking with fear: then, on seeing his family, gave a cry and dropped to his knees in the dust beside them, taking them both into his arms.

‘’m fine, ’m fine,’ the girl was muttering, trying weakly to push her parents away: but she was crying, Fai could see as he hung back uncertain, crying like a child. She was still very young, for all that she carried herself like a soldier, and she clung to Yukito as though she had woken from a nightmare. ‘Not even hurt, see. Just thirsty. I’m - I’m fine.’

‘You could have been dead,’ Yukito told her, wiping at the teary smudges on her face, pushing her hair back from her forehead to look anxiously into her face. Touya had one white-knuckled fist knotted into Yukito’s sleeve and was clinging to him as though his survival depended on it, his face buried against Karura’s hair: his shoulders were shaking. It was such a private moment that Fai had to turn away, achingly relieved that the girl was safe, and yet, in some small and wretched hollow of his heart, screamingly jealous that she had not brought Kurogane back with her. ‘We thought -’

‘I really am sorry,’ the girl said, catching at Yukito’s wrists and holding them, putting her face against his shoulder for a moment. ‘But I’m fine, I am! I’m fine! I got out, I’m fine, I - it’s the old guy who’s still back there.’

Touya seemed to have recovered himself enough to draw himself up straight, clear his throat. ‘The old guy?’ he repeated, frowning, then. ‘Flowright!’

Heart pounding, head swimming, Fai rearranged his face once more and stepped forward. He knew the girl only vaguely: had glimpsed her a few times in the mirror, knew her name and position, not much more. From the searching look in her eyes, he imagined that she recognised him in much the same way: and suddenly, as they looked at each other through the dust and the wind and the blinding heat, a sort of understanding passed between them. She reached out and caught at his sleeve, gripped hard at his hand, left a red stain behind in the palm of that white glove: not mud, not the red dust of the desert, but blood, half-congealed, uninjured though she was.

‘He got me out,’ she said, her eyes searching his, as though desperate to make him understand. ‘He saved my life and got me out. He said to tell you, come and find him. He said hurry.’ Her fingers tightened on his. The blood was not her own. ‘He said to tell you he’s still alive.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the villains have identities now! PROGRESS. to clarify, this is canon Bols we meet in Clover proper, but Tohru is a Clow alternate.


	7. wondrous strong

There was a thick strap of leather in his mouth, and copper bands clamped tight across his chest, each one sprouting its own writhing crops of wires that grew like roots into his skin. A thick sickly ringing noise ate at the back of his skull. He could not see anything save a single lantern, fixed high overhead: a reddish bulb behind grey glass, a copper coil. Something was needling at his arm, picking insistently at the skin, unearthing each of the thick connective wires in turn only to have them creep undaunted back into his flesh. There was blood in the back of his throat, and a needle between each of his teeth. He did not know where he was.

‘Oh, that’s interesting,’ a voice said. ‘That’s very interesting. Tell me - what happens when we pull?’

* * *

High overhead, the door clanged shut.

Leaning heavily against the wall of the half-subterranean cell, Kurogane could see through the narrow window only the smallest sliver of what appeared to be a bare courtyard. Red dust and dark stones were heaped against a wall of rosy sandstone, and in the red dawn light he thought he could make out the edge of what seemed to be a discarded horse-shoe, but a clutch of obnoxiously purple succulents that grew thick about the base of the bars obscured all else. He scowled at them. He considered muttering _Fucking flowers_ , but there would be very little point if Fai wasn’t there to say _Surely not even a moody old puppy like you could be grumpy enough to hate flowers_ and then _Perhaps I should make you a beautiful crown of daisies!_ as soon as Kurogane snapped _The only thing that’s more of a waste of space than flowers is your face!_ He sighed instead and pushed himself off the wall

The little prison was cylindrical, far taller than it was wide: lit by small apertures that seemed to have been designed more for ventilation than to aid sight, the roof spiralled up into a cone caked with the muddy nests of swallows, all abandoned. A rough ladder, jumbled about the foot of which were several broken crates and a good deal of dry chaffy straw, all of which seemed to have been thrown there indiscriminately. At first he had thought this place an old storage cellar, but then there had been the drainage channels and enamelled grates that ringed it round, and the gurgling of plumbing far below, and the beam that jutted out from the doorframe, still kitted out with a rusty winch that creaked whenever a breeze crept in. An ice-house, then, he had decided, long out of use. Two long half-moon cells had been hastily thrown up against the walls, oddments of scrap metal badly welded into dry wooden frames and chained shut. It was cold enough down here to set any prisoners shivering, but it was better by far than being exposed to the desert sun, and so far they had been fed well enough on bread and dried meat. It could, Kurogane had supposed at first, have been infinitely worse. That had been before the interrogation.

Karura was slumped against the far side of their cell, sleeping uneasily. Early on in their imprisonment, when she had still been unconscious, Kurogane had done his best to make her comfortable, folding her cloak into a makeshift pillow and bundling his own around her as close as he could: she was not used to sleeping at such low temperatures, and he knew from experience how quickly a motionless body could go into shock. She had hit her head badly during the transportation, and had spent the better part of the eighteen hours asleep, despite Kurogane’s best efforts to wake her. He was glad that she had not been there to see him dragged away into interrogation, however: and going to her now, he was relieved to she see her stirring at last.

‘Oi,’ he said, putting one hand on her shoulder, angling himself away from her as best he could so that the blood would not startle her. ‘Oi, kid. You wanna wake up now?’

She tensed, then yelped, ‘ _Shit_!’ and jolted awake, staring wildly all about, hand going uselessly to her hip: but Garuda had been confiscated together with Ginryuu, and she was weaponless. She saw Kurogane hovering over her and subsided, shoulders heaving with the aftermath of panic, and offered him a wobbly sort of grin. ‘Oh. Hey. It’s you. Was I - I was awake before, right? I remember coming here, I think.’

‘You were knocked half silly,’ Kurogane told her, and reached over for the clay bowl of cold water he had set aside for her, put it into her bruised bleedy hands.

He was too old to be looking after kids, he told himself, irritably: but he had done this before, for Sorata and for Yuzuriha and a dozen other children in Suwa, for Syaoran on half a hundred worlds, for that other, older, further Syaoran whom he would never see again. He saw bravery in Karura’s shaking hands and the way she fought to steady them, fought to bring water to her lips, fought to live. He remembered that strange unreal place where he had first taught that long-lost child how to hunt demons, remembered the scrapes and the bruises, the unflagging determination. His own father had done this for him, once, long ago: had picked him up after a fall from his horse and a bad sprain, given him a small sweet apple to eat, rinsed his scrapes off with river water and a few gentle jokes, helped him back into the saddle. So things went on. Worlds away, across universes, on the other side of time, there would always be this. There would always be fear, and bravery, and a parent who made bad jokes and wiped the blood from a child’s hands regardless of whether or not that blood was shared.

Acutely aware of how frail he himself had grown, he heaved a great disgruntled sigh and sat down beside the girl: tugged the brick of bread from the little hole in the wall where he had kept it safe and dropped it into her lap. ‘You wouldn’t stop babbling, so I figured you needed to sleep it off,’ he continued, as she grabbed the bread and began to gnaw at it ravenously. ‘That woman with the swords, she really punched you up. We got here, what, noon yesterday? It’s morning now.’

‘Yeah, well, she was a dirty cheat,’ Karura grumbled, alternating between gulps of water and mouthfuls of bread. ‘I’d like to take her on in a fair fight - level ground, no damn river, no damn dead people! See who punches who up then.’ She chewed angrily for a moment. ‘Whatever, I’ll get her soon her enough. How you holding up? This can’t be easy on an old guy like you. Let me see that arm of yours.’

‘Call me old one more time,’ he suggested, loudly, and settled himself back against the wall, taking great care to seem nonchalant. ‘I’m alright.’

Karura stopped chewing: swallowed her last mouthful of bread, put the bowl of water down. ‘Let me see your arm, old man,’ she said.

There was a note of steel in her voice he had not heard before. He glanced away, irritable: tried to cross his arms and found to his exasperation that he could not. Fai would have noticed immediately, and even Syaoran would not have needed more than a minute, but then again, he would not have hidden it from them at all. He had learned long ago that nothing good came of secrets, not where families were concerned, and Karura was close enough to family, he supposed, obnoxious though she was and hot-headed moreover. With a sigh of resignation, he sat up: angled his shoulder toward the light, showed her the ragged edge of his sleeve and the rough-bandaged mass of gore beneath.

She drew in a breath. ‘Oh,’ she said. In the dim light from the window, her eyes were very wide, and her lip had curled in horror. She reached out to touch the wound, gently, instinctively, then flinched back. The steel was gone from her voice, and when she spoke again she sounded young - young and astonished, as though she had never expected war to end in true wounding, as though she had thought it all glory and show. ‘But they could’ve - they could’ve killed you.’

‘Could’ve done worse than kill me,’ Kurogane said, looking her dead in the eye. Her mouth was all twisted up, her jaw trembling, but she had to hear it. ‘You get that, right? This was torture. This is what happens. This is war.’

She held his gaze. ‘I get it,’ she said. Slowly, her lip stopped trembling, and she gritted her teeth. Those pale eyes remained wide and horrified, but they never wavered. ‘I get it.’

He nodded, looked away. She fell back as though released from a physical grip.‘They’ve got their bait now, anyway,’ he said, as though it were an afterthought, and leaned back against the wall: tried and failed _again_ to cross his arms, began to grow very irritable with himself. ‘They’ve got proof we’re here. They’ll keep us alive. Hostages, that’s what we are.’

Karura went back to her loaf of bread. ‘You trying to make me feel better, old man?’ she asked, quiet and wry, as she broke off a crust.

‘Shut your mouth and eat your food.’

She laughed in that particular cocky way of hers, which only made him grumpier. ‘Sure thing, jiichan,’ she said, smirking, and gnawed at her crust. ‘You, ah - you’re gonna be OK without it, right?’ she added, mouth full. ‘I mean - look, I don’t want you dying on me, got it? Syaoran would _kill_ me. He thinks you’re so great. He thinks you’re a hero or something.’

Kurogane disregarded this last, largely because it made something embarrassingly like fondness push at his heart. ‘I’ve managed without it before,’ he said, purposefully gruff, and then added, ‘’Sides, I can’t die yet. Made a promise.’

Karura was nodding. ‘Me too,’ she said, less like a young child emulating a hero, and more like a friend offering solidarity. ‘I promised Aa-chan I’d teach her swordfighting. I always promise Saya-chan I’ll help look after Suiren on her days off. I promised the Captain I’ll help him protect the Queen, always. So I’m not dying yet either.’

By day the sunshine pierced the narrow windows high overhead in long thin beams, so that they wove a criss-cross web of wiry light that glittered with motes of dust, and was barred only by the shadow of the occasional falling feather. The dome glowed rose-red. Footsteps came and went outside and echoed loud around the ice-house, for the deep walls caught each sound and threw it round and about several times before growing bored of it. As the afternoon wore on and the sun sank lower, it left the roof, so that by the time a cool evening wind had begun to stir the dust outside, only a single arm of sunlight remained to stretch through the low window and rest its bloody palm against the opposite wall.

There was no other means of measuring time, and nothing to do save count bars and sleep. Food was provided once again toward the cooler edge of the afternoon, just before sunset: some kind of thick broth, this time, and more knots of bread. It was bland fare, but hardly a starvation diet. Multiple precautions were taken before anyone entered the ice-house, including an initial sweep of the dark interior using some kind of high-powered electric flashlight, and three additional sentries at the top of the ladder. Their escape, if it came, would not be from above.

‘They’re vulnerable when they’re climbing down,’ Karura offered, sipping at her soup. ‘Guess there’s no point trying to jump ’em, though, even if we could get out. Gravity’s against us, right?’

‘You’re learning,’ Kurogane muttered, struggling to eat his bread one-handed, and eventually giving up any pretence of table-manners and wolfing it down in one bite.

The pain of having the connective cables ripped clean from the stump of his shoulder had been harsh enough to knock him dizzy and blindsighted, but had not cost him too much blood. Torture notwithstanding, he had been just close enough to consciousness to watch as two young and haggard men, wide-eyed medics far from home, had washed and bandaged the ragged edges. He would not be surprised if his next meal arrived with a neat roll of linen and fresh antiseptic salve. It was almost crueller than outright brutality to understand that he belonged so utterly to the man with the steel-rimmed glasses, that his care and keeping depended entirely on his usefulness. Still, he had been through far worse, and they clearly did not want him dead, not yet. Even if they had, he would have survived out of sheer spite. He had a promise to keep.

It was hard to hear anything in particular from outside through the echoing depth of the ice-house, but at odd hours throughout the day he had thought he just could make out a low steady hum that he recognised from other worlds as the sound of a generator. There was something else, too, some touch of that strange thick ringing he had noticed on the slopes of Nebi Huri, a sound so faint and low that it did little more than rattle the backs of his teeth. It was no surprise to him that the swallows’ nests were empty, or that the ice-house was curiously free of vermin: no surprise that their adversary had had to bring in some invented creature, monstrous and unnatural, to fight for them. It was not unlikely that they had some means of observing their makeshift dungeon, and he did not like to discuss any notion of escape, not until he was certain they had privacy. He remembered that far grey city with its electric lights and gleaming smog. _What happens when we pull?_ He shook his head, frustrated with himself. Fai was the magician. Fai would have known what to do.

Kurogane was used to waiting and had spent his fair share of afternoons in prison cells - although usually they had been of a far friendlier sort, outside which well-meaning but very confused village officials debated what ought to be done with the polite and impossible travellers who had fallen out of the sky into the well, or the watering-hole, or the village green, or, once, a large wagon full of cabbages. Karura, on the other hand, was an impatient girl, full of energy and anger, and had spent most of her time awake pacing up and down the length of their cell, or pulling at the bars with her bare hands, or yelling very creative strings of curses up the ladder. She would only wear herself out that way, Kuroganeknew: and so, as the sunlight slipped down the wall, he began to talk.

‘Wouldn’t expect some kid like you to be second in command of the palace guard, anyway,’ he remarked, casually, as she gave up kicking at the bars and flung herself back against the wall with a very teenaged huff of annoyance. ‘What, you turn up one day and call the captain names till he got fed up?’

She crossed her arms and slouched down into her cloak, seemingly too sulky to answer: but after a moment, she gave a small shrug, as though deciding that conversation could not hurt. ‘The High Priest’s my cousin,’ she explained. ‘Third cousin? I think? Something like that. Him and the Captain took me in a while back.’

Kurogane thought back to the last time he had visited Clow, when Rindou had been born. ‘You were that skinny kid running around with a wooden sword trying to catch the porkbun?’ he demanded, staring at the last narrow stripe of sunlight on the far wall and trying to tally up the years. ‘How old are you, anyway?’

‘I’m seventeen,’ Karura said, defensively, just as Syaoran had once said to him, just as Kurogane himself had once insisted to a deeply unimpressed Amaterasu when she had doubted his ability to lead a squadron: years and years ago, he realised, almost too many count, left half a lifetime behind him. ‘The Captain taught me to fight soon’s he could.’

‘Why?’

‘’Cause I asked.’

Kurogane remembered the sweetness of cherry blossom, the chill of rainy spring air: remembered the smooth sheen of the red-lacquered floors as he knelt in the imperial audience chamber, heart pounding with frustration at the unfairness of it all as he glared down at the scar on his small calloused hand. He had wanted only to be allowed to test his strength, to defend his country, to protect the child who had saved his life and given him a home, and whom he loved above all things. _Why?_ Amaterasu had asked him, and he had been unable to answer, unable to explain, had known only that he must be the best and the greatest, so powerful that not even death dared to stand against him.

He touched one hand to the stump of his arm. He said again, ‘Why?’

Karura let out a long breath. He saw, very clearly, how her hand moved to clutch at the hilt of the sword that was not there. _He didn’t deserve it, so I stole it._ ‘I had a sister,’ she said, finally. ‘Our parents weren’t parents, not real parents, not like the High Priest and the Captain are. And she was just little, and it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t right she had to grow up scared and hurt all the time. So we got out, and I took care of her, except then she got sick.’ She spread both her palms, gave a sort of shrug. Her voice was clear and low and steady. ‘I figured, after that, I needed to get stronger. So I did. The end.’

Kurogane nodded. ‘Guess those two ended up with a pretty good daughter, then,’ he said, easily, and was heartened when she made a grumpy little noise of embarrassment: caught the edge of her grin just before it faded, and was content.

They watched the stripe of sunlight move down the wall together.

‘Hey, look, I know you’re like a million years old and all, but - you have kids, right?’ Karura asked, after a while.

Immediately regretful of the entire enterprise, Kurogane narrowed his eyes in suspicion. ‘Hell no,’ he muttered: then, against his better judgement, relented just long enough to admit, ‘Got a family, though. Close enough.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘It’s just, I always thought - well, the Queen, she - um. When the babies asked, she always said that, that the - you know, the arm - she always said it happened because you love your family more than anything.’

Kurogane spluttered. This, he decided, was what he got for trying to make conversation. ‘Who the hell asked for her opinion?’ he growled, loud as he could despite having to clear his throat twice. ‘Don’t go being the kind of gullible idiot who believes everything anyone tells you, you hear? What does that even - what kind of bullshit is she telling her kids? Some queen she is, lying her ass off like that!’

Karura gave a little snort of amusement, but continued undeterred. ‘Was it worth it?’

‘Of course it was worth it!’ Kurogane yelled, and retreated as far down inside the collar of his shirt as he could, the better to hide his burning cheeks. ‘Do I look like the kind of dumbass who just cuts off their own damn arm and then _regrets_ it? What the fuck kind of question even _is_ that?’

She turned to gape at him, and he rescinded all his previous judgements as to her maturity. Her cheek and temple were badly bruised, and her hair was caked with three-day filth, but beneath the mud and the fear and the exhaustion she could have been a child again, listening open-mouthed and wide-eyed to war-stories as she perched on a veteran’s knee by the fireside. ‘You _cut it off yourself_?’ she demanded, so that he was reminded very forcibly of a ten-year-old Sorata, eagerly requesting story after story, and cheering whenever Fai indulged him. Something pulled at his heart. ‘Didn’t that _hurt_?’

‘You mind your own damn business,’ he snapped at her, and, lacking anything else to do, leapt to his feet and went to glare out of the bars. The last of light had left the wall: he glanced up, and saw the that dozen small openings overhead shone dimly blue in the twilight. In that moment, he wanted, more than anything else, to go home: to bring this child safe to her family and perhaps spend a good few hours showing her some decent parries in a sunlit training yard, to see Syaoran, to speak with Sakura, and then to return to the quiet of Suwa, to the leafy rivers and misty hills, to Fai.

‘You kind of are a hero,’ Karura said, sounding much too surprised about it for Kurogane’s liking. ‘Wow. I thought you were just grumpy. You’re actually pretty cool, though.’

‘If you don’t shut your mouth I’ll shut it for you,’ he told her, feeling his face grow warm all over again.

She laughed. She said, ‘Hey, you better watch out! Maybe one day I’ll be even cooler than you are.’

And in spite of himself, in spite of the longing in his heart and the ache in his arm, he found himself grinning into the twilight. He said, ‘Like hell you will.’

* * *

The moon had been waning, but what little light it held had flooded the night with silver. There in the pale haze, amid the curtains billowing white as snow, a single shadow stretched out across the floor. Kurogane had reached out to touch it, then remembered too late that his arm was no longer there. Air strained out to catch at darkness and could not keep hold. Far away on the other side of time, between wanderings and the war, a nameless ache had begun in his chest. It had been quieter than grief, rarer than hope, and he had not understood it until that night, when Fai had put his thin face up to the moonlight and heaved a small sigh. Kurogane had supposed then that he might as well call it peace: and that, strangely, set his heart beating harder than it ever had in any battle.

It took him some moments to stand up, and several more to negotiate the mechanics of walking while newly lopsided, but he managed at last to join Fai at the screen door. The longing to put his hand to the nape of that pale neck was profound. He clenched his fist instead. Their shadows streamed back and back, two dark brush-strokes against the bare floor, but could not touch.

‘I suppose all this means you want me to stick around?’ Fai had said, lightly, one hand caught in the curtains.

Kurogane had swallowed. ‘You could say that, yeah.’

‘Why?’

In the single angriest moment of his short angry life, Kurogane had said, ‘Don’t you _dare_ tell me you don’t know by now.’

Fai had retaliated quite neatly by kissing him.

Even in those perfumed airy chambers, the taste of blood had lingered on his mouth, the smell of it in his bright hair. Kurogane had lived all his days with blood in his mouth and never thought to find it in another. A hundred people in a hundred worlds had asked him _why?_ and _was it worth it?_ but after that first night Fai never did. Kurogane had not clung to him, not quite, but he had pulled Fai in close against him, kissed him so sweetly and so simply: drawn him out of the watchful white gaze of the moon and into a sheltering dark. He did not fear to be broken. He knew their combined strength.

‘Even through everything,’ he had said, stammering as he never had before, his voice caught thick in his throat, face hot as he fumbled his hands to Fai’s hips, heart pounding, ‘even when - even - I still -’

‘I wanted you the moment I saw you,’ Fai had said, in a breath against his neck that nearly broke him, and then added, archly, ‘Glad I didn’t kill you.’

Kurogane put his face into Fai’s hair. ‘One thing we’ve got in common, then.’

He had woken, once or twice in the colourless light of dawn, to the touch of two fingers at the crook of his arm, at his remaining wrist, at the beat of blood in the hollows of his throat. Fai had not slept that night, he knew. Fai had been bargaining for the return of his strength: not out of guilt, not out of obligation, but because the sacrifice would be worth it. It would always be worth it. There was no need for doubt.

* * *

‘Look, this is, what, the fourth day, now?’ Karura was saying, slipping her fingers in and out of the little cat’s cradle she had made by dint of picking threads from her cloak and knotting them into a single long strand with which she could build any number of intricate webs that flashed and changed pale in the dark. ‘So clearly we can’t count on my idiot family for a rescue. Looks like we should start figuring it out for ourselves.’

Kurogane cast a glance over his shoulder: twitched nervously as a shadow passed across the low window and a noise of footfalls grew and faded. ‘Much as I hate to say it, you’re probably right,’ he allowed her, quietly as he could. That low hum had yet to fade, and he could not shake the sense that they were being watched. ‘It’s not that I don’t trust those guys, but knowing them they’re all sitting around in the Palace talking about their feelings right now, and if we waited around for them to get done with that, we’d be here till I could start calling _you_ old.’

‘So we need a plan of our own, right?’ she asked, grinning. ‘Right? Right! An escape plan! Finally!’

Even as she said it, there came a sudden burst of voices, and the door clattered open. Kurogane swung round, stepping instinctively in front of Karura, throwing out an arm to keep her back. He had knownthat they were being monitored: he _known_ not to talk so openly of escape -

But the guard who climbed down seemed to have no interest in either Karura or Kurogane. She stalked across the ice-house floor, slipping once or twice in the hay, and, with a great clattering of keys, opened the door of the opposite cell. She flicked a flashlight at the door, twice, in what seemed to be an all-clear. A dark shape was bundled down the ladder from guard to guard: was hauled roughly onto its feet and shoved into the cell. It was only once the door rolled shut and the dust began to settle that Kurogane recognised the new prisoner as the woman with the flambard blades.

She was closer to Karura’s age than his own, he saw now. A certain sternness about the jaw, and the weariness in her thin face, had at a distance conspired to make her seem far older, but nearer to hand he guessed that she could not have been very much more than twenty or twenty-two. She huddled into herself against the bars, shoulders hunched tight under her messy spill of her hair, each breath coming loud and harsh in the stillness.

‘Wouldn’t have thought this was the officers’ barracks as well as a prison,’ Kurogane remarked, casual and clear.

The woman’s head went up. Her eyes flashed like two sparks through the shadows and found his. She said, ‘You thought right.’

‘Hey,’ Karura said, striding toward the bars and putting her face between them, like a child at a zoo, ‘hey, hey, wait, you’re - I just want to be on record as saying that I would have kicked your ass if that had been a fair fight, OK?’

The woman shrugged, rubbed at her hair, looked away. ‘Do I look like I care?’

‘ _I_ care, and just because you’re a good-for-nothing traitor with way more swords than necessary, you don’t have to be rude!’ Karura snapped.

Kurogane frowned at the word _traitor_. It dawned on him, slowly, that the woman was from this world, after all: even discounting her features, which up close he could see very clearly had the look of a Clow woman, her greaves were of the particular steelwork he had noted in Syaoran and Karura’s armour, and her rough charcoal trousers and undershirt were hemmed black with that same thick border that he had seen daily on the streets.

‘I don’t need to talk to you,’ she was saying to Karura, in a thick heavy voice: it sounded as though she had been shouting, or crying, or both. ‘I don’t need to waste my time. You keep to yourself, got it? And I’ll do the same. Everybody wins.’ She snapped her mouth shut in a last, sharp gesture of defeat, then turned away: huddled into herself like a hurt cat.

Karura fell back from the bars, looking distinctly sulky, and stalked back to her corner. Kurogane caught her eye and raised his hand: _give her space_. She pulled a face, but subsided into a pout without further complaint. She meant well, he knew: concern only sped impatience, and he had done his share of shouting. His instinct was to join her in sulking, but what little he had learnt of tactful negotiation over the years surfaced now. He went to the little stash of medical supplies that he had carefully kept aside from the daily rations in case of catastrophe, and selected from it one of the little plastic packages of gauze. They were antiseptic, by the smell of them, and seemed to have a slightly numbing effect, too. He went the bars, sat there cross-legged and unconcerned: rolled the little package across the great dusty stripe of light between their cells, watched it knock to a stop against the base of the bars in a little heap of straw.

He said, quietly, ‘Hey.’

‘I told you to leave me _alone_ ,’ was all the answer he got.

From her corner, Karura gave a huff, as though to say _What did you expect?_ Kurogane shot a glare at her, frustration rising. He drew in a long breath: was struck suddenly by an old, soft memory of Fai negotiating their way out of a particularly tense situation involving enchanted wombats. _You could stand to learn a little diplomacy, you know,_ Fai had said, and Kurogane had said, _That’s what I have you for, obviously. Look out!_ Then there had been an accidental wedding, and a daring jailbreak, and far too much running. Now, staring at the chaffy hay floating pale in the light, he gave a small smile. He did not mind old age, he thought. He had had a good time getting there: and even without his sword, he could still fight.

‘Forget the kid,’ he advised the stranger. ‘Those’re bandages. Use them. You got a name?’

The woman did not answer for a long while. Then, slowly, her rough bloodstruck hand crept out into the light, closed around the packet of bandages. She said, ‘Tohru.’

‘Right. The kid’s called Karura. I’m Kurogane. Guess you know about us already, though.’ He watched her. She broke open the package and set to dabbing at the bad bruise on her forehead. She had not been jailed without a fight, he realised, and liked her for that, even if he still could not be sure that even her wounds were not simply dressings for some elaborate charade. ‘You tell us: how do we know that you’re not down here to mess with our heads somehow?’

‘Because I got tired of playing those fuckers’ shitty mind-games, that’s why.’ She pushed the bandages against her bleedy knuckles, gave a little breath of relief as the numbing agent set to work. ‘Look, I’ll tell you this as a - as a sign of faith. We met with the delegation from the castle earlier today, about three hours out from here. The Palace Captain was there, the old guy with the grumpy face who leads the soldiers sometimes? And some others I never saw before. Bols was holding the two of you over their heads, saying grandpa over there was dead, saying he was gonna kill you next. It got bad, it got ugly. One of em had magic, real magic, like nothing I ever saw. I had to tell em. I had to tell em you were alright. We would have died otherwise.’ She shrugged slightly, leaned her thin-cheeked face against the bars. ‘This whole thing - this whole thing hasn’t been what I thought when we started out a couple months back. Bols said he could help me. I didn’t know what he was. I didn’t know he was a monster.’

‘You had no problem helping him burn down houses,’ Karura said darkly from her corner. ‘That Bols guy, or whatever his name is. You had no problem helping him level entire villages.’

‘I never killed anyone!’ Tohru snapped, and clenched her fist so hard around the bars that scraps of rust flaked off and drifted into the hay. ‘I never killed anyone. I made his men leave the girls alone, always, made him take the damn food and get out. I kept him in check, I never took him to anywhere really poor or really hard-by. If I hadn’t been around it would have been a lot worse.’

‘Doesn’t change what you did,’ Karura continued. Keeping a firm grip on his temper, Kurogane watched them both, the woman in her weariness and the child in her unrestraint, waiting to step in, watching it unfold. ‘So maybe you hit the big towns instead of the little ones, so many he didn’t kill as many as he would have. He killed enough! You’re just feeling guilty, that’s all! You’re just trying to make yourself feel better!’

‘I know!’ Tohru shouted, and slammed at the bars. ‘I _know_ , alright? You don’t have to tell me!’

The noise of struck iron rolled around the ice-house. Footsteps came and went, and a shadow barred the sunlight. Kurogane opened his mouth.

But, ‘How come you were working for him, anyway?’ Karura asked, quietly, without any of her usual abrasiveness. ‘You’re - you’re one of us.’

Tohru had slumped against the bars, bandages uncoiling bloody in her hands, hair hazy as a flame in the light. She seemed very, very tired. Kurogane had seen that exhaustion before, reflected in a shard of glass in a cold country where the dead lay unnumbered, and so he knew before she spoke that she would answer Karura with a question of her own: ‘You ever been in love?’

‘Nope,’ Karura said, easily. ‘Don’t really do the whole falling in love thing, sorry. But explain it anyway, I like a good sob story as much as the next person.’

‘Fuck your sob stories,’ Kurogane muttered, and saw something like a smile touch Tohru’s harsh face.

‘Whatever, I like a good sob story as much as the next person who isn’t a giant fun-ruining grump,’ Karura corrected herself, and in that moment, some combination of the set of her jaw and that particular teasing tone prompted Kurogane to wonder, irrationally, if there were not perhaps some world, in some farflung fold of reality, where he and Fai had produced a child not unlike this one. Perhaps the fight was not all his, after all. Perhaps he could help her through it. She had seen Tohru’s smile, too, and she offered one of her own in exchange. ‘Come on, then, tell us. It’ll pass the time, and we’ve got nothing better to do, since jiichan here is too boring to want to tell us war stories.’

‘Nothing to tell,’ Tohru said, looking very much as though she regretted broaching the topic in the first place. ‘There was a girl, but I fucked up, and she - she got hurt. Bols, he said maybe if I helped him out, well, maybe he’d think about bringing her back. Said he had a way to do it, like the peltasts except not all wrong, said he’d do it if I helped him. Pretty stupid of me to believe him.’

There was a sticky silence. ‘Bringing people back doesn’t happen,’ Karura said, carefully. ‘Those things, those - peltasts? What?’

‘Don’t look at me, I didn’t name them,’ Tohru said, shrugged. ‘He said that’s what they’re called, back where he’s from. He said everything’s made of metal, there, and they do magic all the time, except it’s not magic, it’s electric power, it’s machines like the generators, like the lights. He said there’s even people who can control it with their minds.’

‘Well, that’s disturbing,’ Karura decided. ‘Anyway, look, the point is, they aren’t alive. Not for real, anyway, not properly. You know that, right? What’s dead is dead.’

Tohru nodded against the bars. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘But - you get it, though? When you know you - you _have_ to fix it, even though you can’t?’

‘I get it.’

 _She got sick_ , was all Karura had said. It would always be this way. There would always be a sister, or a brother, a lover or a friend, a family. There would always be a need to fix it. Kurogane remembered. Kurogane understood. ‘I’ve seen people do worse for less,’ he allowed, finally, feeling very keenly the space of air where his arm was not, and changed the subject as unsubtly as he knew how. ‘Hey, listen. This guy with magic - skinny? Fair hair? Smiling like an idiot?’

A greyish pallor came into Tohru’s face at the description. ‘He nearly killed us,’ she said. There was real fear in her voice. ‘I never knew anyone could do that. There’s monsters and machines here, but he was just one man.’

‘That _fucker_ ,’ Kurogane groaned. ‘I told him to stay where he was!’

‘Yeah, well, whoever he is, he knows you’re alive,’ Tohru said. ‘That was the most I could do. Bols wasn’t happy about it, though.’

Karura was looking at Kurogane as though wanting to speak. He shook his head, infinitesimally, and Karura subsided. Over-eager rookie though she may have been, she at least seemed to have the sense not to try and hatch plans in front of an unknown adversary. ‘You’re good at - talking,’ she said to him instead, quietly, so that Tohru would not hear. ‘A lot more patient than I would have thought, anyway.’

‘I’m old, remember?’ he hissed back at her, as Tohru straightened up a little and began to pull her fingers through her hair, wincing as blood flaked from the knots like rust. ‘You learn this shit.’

But Karura grinned at him. ‘Not that old,’ she reassured him. ‘Still useful.’ And then, ‘So - Tohru, right? What’s your hometown, anyway?’

Tohru’s lip twitched. She said a word or words that Kurogane did not know, something that whatever translation matrix the camp was using could not replicate: but Karura’s face lit up, and she said, ‘No way! On the river, right, up north? I was stationed up there a while back! You had so many flower gardens! I never saw that many, not even at the palace!’

Tohru gave a little laugh, and a soft look of remembrance lit her face. Kurogane left them to it, feeling oddly accomplished: sat back against the bars and stared up at the waning light of the little window. _Still useful_ , he thought. He pressed at the stump of his arm, just once. _Let’s hope so._

* * *

He dreamed that night of fire, and of a boy who walked through it untouched, his bright hair gleaming like a beacon atop a tall tower, his eyes lit a gaseous candle-heart blue. He dreamed of ice, and of a boy who lay as though dead upon the hearth of an old cold house where ash fell like snow and a snow glittered bloody under starlight. _You have to fix it_. They had made their repairs in each other, had built a shared home and drawn the old foundations broken across worlds so close that the one could no longer be pulled from the other. They had learned temperance together: surely it would not be allowed for them to die apart. _I will see you again_. He trusted that as he trusted nothing else: and yet he could not break steel or bend rock, could not force his way from captivity, could not help the country he had been asked to defend. _Come and find me_ , was all he could ask. He knew when to fight and when to be still. He knew, now, how to trust.

‘Kurogane-san?’

He was jolted awake, head heavy, the stump of his arm prickling and cold, to find that he was not awake at all. He moved through a strange space, airless and numbing, every motion slow and sluggish, every thought thrice as sharp. He had been here before, once, while on the edge of death: he remembered Tomoyo’s voice echoing clear through the cold depths: but in front of him now was a face he had seen almost every day, and yet had not known in twenty years.

‘Kid,’ he said, swallowing around the sudden hard lump in his throat: then, struggling to sit up, found himself angry. ‘Where the hell have you been?’

Real as he had ever been, Syaoran sat down beside him. He was older than he had been on that day that he had disappeared from the heart of the desert: he had grown strong, and there were lines at the corners of his mouth, a small scar at the tanned temple. Still Kurogane knew easily and immediately who it was sitting beside him, simply by that little worried smile, those firm brown eyes. This was not the Pilgrim of the Realms. This was the boy who had stood alone under rain and cried where no one could see him. This was the boy who had put a blade through his own flesh to win his family time. This was his son.

‘Sorry we haven’t made it back yet,’ Syaoran said, and ducked his head, scrubbed at his hair with a guilty hand. ‘I know we promised, but it’s taking a while. This dream is the best we could manage. We’ll see you and Fai-san again someday, though, we promise!’

Kurogane actually had to push at the corners of his eyes to stop the sting of tears: reached up with an arm that was not there, felt for a moment helplessly off-balance, weaker than he had ever been. ‘He worries about you a lot, you know,’ he said, roughly, because that was all he could say: because he had finally found the last fragment of their family, and Fai was not at his side to witness it. ‘That idiot, he - he worries. Misses you, both of you. Thinks it was damn rude of you to just up and disappear like that.’

Syaoran smiled. ‘Tell Fai-san that we’re doing just fine,’ he said, and put his hand on Kurogane’s hurt shoulder.

Kurogane nodded, cleared his throat: did not shake off the touch. ‘You’re together, right?’ he asked, lightly, as though it didn’t mean much. It meant everything. From somewhere far away, he could smell the sweetness of cherry blossom. He did not dare look around, lest the dream break, but he was aware all the same of a profound gentleness, as though someone with a tender heart and a lion’s bravery were keeping watch over him. ‘You and the princess, you’re taking care of each other?’

Syaoran fairly beamed at him, held his chin high. ‘We are,’ he said, proudly, and Kurogane grinned back, heart swelling as he looked at the boy he had taught to fight.

A little scrap of blossom drifted across his vision: he wrinkled his nose and sneezed as a swirl of petals followed it, pale as down in the dark. Syaoran lifted his head, as though hearing a voice in the distance. ‘Oh,’ he said, sounding very forlorn. ‘Oh, alright. Um, Sakura says you need to wake up.’

‘Really?’ Kurogane complained: but then, as the weight of that hand on his shoulder wavered, and as the dream began to blur, started forward in concern. ‘Hey, listen! You can’t just show up here and then -’

Syaoran shook his head. Veins of light showed through his skin. The sweetness of cherry blossom had given way to a stench of smoke, and those were not petals blowing across the darkness, but sparks of fire. ‘I’m sorry, but there’s no time. You have to wake up.’ He flickered, browning at the edges like an old photograph, and then fell away in a cloud of ash. ‘Wake up!’

Kurogane jolted upright and found himself face-to-face with Karura. ‘What the hell?’ he demanded: but the light was thick as amber, and there was a sharp shockingly loud noise, like the crackling of firestuff on a hearth, and the air cut at his lungs like a blade. For a moment he was a boy again: for a moment he was alone with his mother dead in his arms and the shadow of a beast rising around him through the flames, tall as any tower. He reached for his sword that was not there with an arm he did not have. Then ‘Get _up_!’ Karura screamed at him, and hauled on his hand, so that he was on his feet almost before he could protest.

The heat hit him like a brick to the face, and the smoke stung his throat. Off-balance and weak still with bloodloss though he was, he got his hand onto the girl’s shoulders and forced her down into a crouch, below the smokeline. ‘Stay low,’ he choked at her, eyes blurred almost to uselessness, and dragged her over to the little window. He could not see much beyond the fact that half the timbers overhead had caught. He remembered the straw lying useless in great dry heaps all about, and spent precious breath swearing. There was enough dry tinder in here to cook them alive.

Afterwards he would not remember very much of it. He knew that he got his hand onto the bars of the window and found that the casement had already been touched by fire: red sparks crawled through the wood and charred it black. It would have to be weak enough, he decided. He knew that he must have pulled bar after bar back from their setting, knew that he must have broken stone to achieve it: at one point he became aware that his hand was bleeding: but then, quite suddenly, there was fire overhead, and smoke so thick about his face that he could not breathe, and the last bar had fallen to his feet, and the window was clear.

Karura was staring at them, her face streaked with soot, her pale hair bright as flame in the ruddy light. ‘Go!’ he snapped at her, even though he could not feel his own feet anymore, even though his head was pounding so hard that he thought he might fall over. ‘What are you waiting for? Get out!’

Still she stared: first at him, then at the narrow gap, then back to him, her mouth twisted with disbelief. ‘I can’t just _leave_ you!’ she shouted. ‘What am I supposed to do, tell them I left you here to die?’

He got her hard by the shoulder. Half-starved though she was and surrounded by fire, still she did not flinch, but met his gaze, as brave and as fierce as he himself had ever been. He remembered his son’s steadfast brown eyes, remembered a princess walking slow and unafraid through the burning rain, metal in her leg and courage in her heart. He remembered the half-dozen children still dependant on him at Suwa, the young priestess with her steely calm, the boy with the loud laugh, the girl and her dog. _Still useful_ , he thought _, still useful_ , if he could protect children like these, if he could pass on to them a little of the life he had struggled so long to live out in safety.

‘Tell them I’m alive,’ he said, because he would never lie down to die. ‘You find your uncle, you find that other useless guy, you tell them. Tell them I’m right here. But you get yourself out safe!’

The smoke was hot as a fever and heavier than lead: it choked him like water, blinded him like night. There remained a strange, almost dreamlike quality to things, so that the world was at once much too slow and much too fast, sharp-edged and stum both at once. _Wake up!_ a girl shouted at him from the heart of a cherry tree, and he tried to smile at her, because she had been brave. He wondered if he would see Tomoyo again: he missed her. He blinked, and Karura was scrambling through the window, skinny arms shaking as she pulled herself up. He’d set her daily drills to do when they made it back to the palace, he decided, teach her what being a swordsman was really about: no sense in letting potential go to waste because some kid thought she was too good to turn up to practice.

‘I’m coming back for you, old man,’ she said, her face framed by the window: or he thought that she said it: suddenly she was gone, and he was alone in the ice-house.

He could not see anymore. He could not find Tohru through the smoke, and if she was still alive, she made no sound. Perhaps she had been a decoy after all. Perhaps she had been honest. Perhaps she had set the fire herself, in a last act of loneliness and guilt. He did not know, and likely would never learn. He looked at the bars about his feet, red with rust and blood. He had not known he could do that anymore. Still useful, then. He drew in a great breath and started to choke: raised his arm over his head as a timber above burst in a shower of sparks. Still useful. Unable to breathe, unable to see, he leaned back against the wall, sat down, and closed his eyes.

He knew, now, how to wait.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SURPRISE CLONES, also. I attempting to use tohru and karura to draw ~parallels~ here is that. is that working


End file.
